“Think about how backstory fits the tale you're trying to tell... p.195”

“I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no.”

“The idea that a dysfunctional thought could take root in a vacuum, the individual anonymous and wraithlike, unknowable because, especially at first, he or she had no interaction with other people. Because more and more in the modern Internet era you came across isolated instances of a mind virus or worm: brains that self-washed, bathed in received ideologies that came down from on high, ideologies that could remain dormant or hidden for years, silent as death until they struck. Almost anything could happen now, and did.”

“I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage. To thwart the biologist in me, to frustrate the logic left in me.”

“He was Control, and he was in control.”

“Has there always been someone like me to bury the bodies, to have regrets, to carry on after everyone else was dead?”

“Even through the dulling effects of the pill, he wanted to be rid of his itching brain, his ignited skin, the flesh beneath, to in some way become so ethereal and Unbound to the earth that he could unsee, disavow, disavow”

“I looked not for shooting stars but for fixed ones, and I would try to imagine what kind of life lived in those celestial tidal pools so far from us.”

“Never do something for just one reason.”

“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.”

“Control said nothing, had said nothing for quite some time as if he didn't trust words anymore. Or had begun to cherish the answers silence gave him.”