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141 " We were nervous sometimes, other times not. Anxiety rolled over us in waves. "
― Karen Thompson Walker , The Age of Miracles
142 " I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world’s noise. "
143 " doesn’t every previous era feel like fiction once it’s gone? "
144 " The food chain was withering, and new dead zones had formed in certain waters. Starving "
145 " How could we have known that the workings of the universe had finally made appropriate the fire of my mother’s words? "
146 " This was California—we ate outside in every season. "
147 " Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end. "
148 " There was no footage to show on television, no burning buildings or broken bridges, no twisted metal or scorched earth, no houses sliding off slabs. No one was wounded. No one was dead. It was, at the beginning, a quite invisible catastrophe. "
149 " We kids were not as afraid as we should have been. We were too young to be scared, too immersed in our own small worlds, too convinced of our own permanence. "
150 " ...what is done can sometimes be undone. "
151 " My own family's religion was a bloodless breed of Lutheranism---we guarded no secrets, and we harbored no clear vision of the end of the world. "
152 " – Az életben egyedül meghalni muszáj – felelte Mrs. Pinsky. Ez volt az egyik kedvenc mondása. – Minden más szabadon választható. "
153 " It still amazes me how little we really knew. We had rockets and satellites and nanotechnology. We had robot arms and robot hands, robots for roving the surface of Mars. Our unmanned planes, controlled remotely, could hear human voices from three miles away. We could manufacture skin, clone sheep. We could make a dead man’s heart pump blood through the body of a stranger. We were making great strides in the realms of love and sadness—we had drugs to spur desire, drugs for melting pain. We performed all sorts of miracles: We could make the blind see and the deaf hear, and doctors daily conjured babies from the wombs of infertile women. At the time of the slowing, stem cell researchers were on the verge of healing paralysis—surely the lame soon would have walked. And yet, the unknown still outweighed the known. "
154 " My mother says I spend too much time thinking about the past. We should look ahead, she says, to the time that's left. But the past is long, and the future is short. "
155 " the difference between coincidence and fate. "
156 " We dipped our fingers in the wet cement, and we wrote the truest, simplest things we knew—our names, the date, and these words: We were here. "
157 " who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of regret "
158 " Markets need stability,” said the president. “We can’t continue this way.” It requires a certain kind of bravery, I suppose, to choose the status quo. There’s a certain boldness to inaction. "
159 " This was America. The government could not dictate the way we lived our lives. "
160 " New minutes surfaced everywhere. Time was harder to waste. The "