"If you’ve ever heard a physicist trying to explain to a mere mortal the meaning of quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity, you’ll understand our state. Some waves or other of time overlapping so as to create time splashes that broke off from their substratum into supratime and could be controlled – that’s all I got out of Lyova’s lectures and the popular articles written by my fellow journalists. But in the long run I wasn’t too upset about it. We use electricity without knowing a thing about electrodynamics, and I have yet to see anyone who was too bothered by that fact to go on living."

“Reason is our guide, but the eye is its most trusted counselor.”

“Just try telling a teenager that he’s a conformist. Ha! It’s safer to tweak a tiger’s whiskers. Yet who’s most influenced by fads and fashions? Who is the easiest to turn into a raging mob? The teenager.”

“There are no uninteresting fates, and each man takes away the universe when he dies.”

“We all love mysteries in books and hate them in life. I’m no exception. After all, the reason we love mysteries in books is that the secret is revealed on the last page.”

“What used to be an advantage had quickly turned into a liability, proving once more that in the mountains, as in life, nothing comes easily.”

“When the mind tries to guess the trajectory of a future moral act and concentrates too strenuously on contradictory concepts, the concepts themselves become unclear, because every concept is as deep-rooted and murky in its beginnings as the reality of life that gave rise to it. And the mind falters, determination slips away, and everything seems confused and wrong. That’s how thinking can sometimes destroy determination.”