p. 11 When nothing else of his little postage stamp of Iowa is left to photograph, John turns his camera on the Hoel Chestnut, his exact coeval.
p. 20 At school in Chicago, he learned many things: 1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.
p. 85 Mountains hem him in on three sides. The only TV reception he can get is the ant races. And still a part of him wants to know if his few and private thoughts might in fact be ratified by someone, somewhere. The confirmation of others: a sickness the entire race will die of.
P. 103 A [tree is a] colossal, rising, reaching, stretching space elevator of a billion independent parts, shuttling the air into the sky and storing the sky deep underground, sorting possibility from out of nothing: the most perfect piece of self-writing code that his eyes could hope to see.
p. 114 The parchment-colored leaves riding out the winter - marcescent, he tells her - shining out against the neighboring bare hardwoods.
p. 120 She's not of the herd. She doesn't always hear them well, and when she does, their words don't always make sense. And yet her frantic fellow mammals do make her smile: miracles on all sides, and still they need compliments to keep them happy.
p. 125 The postdoc turns into an adjunct position. She makes almost nothing, but life requires little. Her budget is blessedly free of those two core expenses, entertainment and status.
p. 171 Through the front glass doors of the truck stop, Olivia sees the dozens of gas pumps, and beyond them, the flat expanse of I-80 in the dawn, the snowcapped fields, the endless hostage swap of travelers east and west.... The sky does amazing things. It bruises a little in the freedom of the west, while to the east it spills open like a pomegranate.
p. 210 Falling asleep, he rereads the same paragraph a dozen times; the words turn into twirling things, like winged seeds spinning in the air.
p. 220 A path cuts under the spires lit by late winter's moon, a path she walks almost nightly, out and back like that old palindrome: La ruta nos aportó otro paso natural.
p. 324 Memorial service, at two hundred feet. Adam recalls something he learned in graduate school: memory is always a collaboration in progress.
p. 358 But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.
p. 379 The product here [in the Amazon fulfillment center] is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.
p. 383 To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.
p. 392 He'll never get used to [Colorado]. It's way too cheery, cold, and dry - the harshest kind of Oz. He finds it unnatural, all the aspens and sun. Not a tree out here taller than an adolescent hemlock back home [in California].
p. 423 No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade. We see ornaments or pretty fall foliage. Obstacles blocking the road or wrecking the ski slope. Dark, threatening places that must be cleared. We see branches about to crush our roof. We see a cash crop. But trees - trees are invisible.
p. 443 They sit together in the evening, reading and looking, as the sun glints chartreuse off their chestnut's scalloped leaves. Every baring twig seems to Dorothy like a trial creature, apart from but part of all the others. She sees in the chestnut's branching the several speculative paths of a lived life, all the people she might have been, the ones she could or will yet be, in worlds spreading out just alongside this one.
p. 445 She sits in a chair against the wall in a corner of the meeting area. A board of glowing letters across the concourse reads Boston Boston Chicago Chicago Chicago Dallas Dallas... Human goings. Human doings. Ever faster, ever fuller, ever more mobile, ever more empowered.
p. 465 There's a beech in Ohio Patricia would like to see again. Of all the trees she'll miss like breathing, a simple, smooth-boled beech with nothing special to it except a notch on its trunk four feet up from the ground. Maybe it has thrived. Maybe the sun and rain and air have been good to it. She thinks: Maybe we want to hurt trees so much because they live so much longer than we do.
p. 481 Dams break and memories flood him, like the million keyholes of light coming down through the palms of a horse chestnut.
p. 496 He pushes the joystick on the chair and rolls out of the lab into the mild night. The air is spiced with bay laurel and lemon eucalyptus and pepper trees. The scent retrieves all kinds of things he once knew and reminds him of all those things he never will. He breathes in for a long time. Phenomenal, to be such a small, weak, short-lived being on a planet with billions of years left to run.
