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247 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
"There's no one explanation, Everett. People remember some kind of disaster. But there's no agreement on what it was..."
"Don't worry about it. It's like a jump cut in a movie. Everyone is missing something."
"I've been getting these dreams ever since the break..."
"Living under the regime of an eccentric dreamer may be better than suffering through the disjointed, amnesiac period that followed the disaster."
"As in previous eras, the leaders are not necessarily those who are wisest or strongest. They are the ones with a certain fixity of vision. And with the most comforting explanation for the disaster."
"The map is not the territory, man."
"San Francisco...[was]...a city of erasures."
"Basically a lot of the old connections between things fell away, which gave people a chance to make up new ones. But the new ones don't always stick."
"It's very local. I'm sure you've noticed how local things can get nowadays."
"You know, the weirdness came out, that's all. It's not like it wasn't always there..."
"The dreams seemed designed, either by the computer or by some part of his sleeping self, to nudge him towards speculations about his life before...they confused him...He suspected that some of it was just dreams, not actual memories. Anyway, he'd learned by now to distrust dreams and memories both. Both could be inauthentic."
"What did his attachment to Cale and Gwen mean if he could barely remember them? Who was he, if all he knew of himself was the shreds of memory that clung to these people?"
"In America everybody's already wandering around lost. Even before the changes."
"Keep me from forgetting. Don't let me get lost like that again."
"A gestalt urge for coherence, after the rupture."
"And there's the dreamstuff, you know. The Man got into everybody's head, so I guess everybody got a look at how severely neurotic The Man actually was..."
"Sane and real only go so far these days."
"I came back to [San Francisco] to find her [Gwen], and I found her. And what I found there, in her arms, whatever the surrounding conditions, was real. Is real."
"I thought I was coming back to something, if I came back here. To a self."
"Who you are isn't a matter of memories, anyway...It's what you do. Your choices. Who you make yourself into."
"You're Everett, in love with Gwen. Everett with Gwen. Just like I'm Gwen with Everett, Gwen for Everett. Do you love me, Everett?"