The Gone World Quotes

“There is no design. The universe isn’t kind or cruel. The universe is vast and indifferent to our desires.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“The totality of human endeavour is nothing when set against the stars.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Nothing blinks out, nothing ends. Everything exists, always exists. Life is but a dream, Shannon. Self is the only illusion.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“It used to be thought that hell was a lack of God, but hell is a lack of death.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Lambs are sacrificed but rats survive.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“She was a ghost, haunting her own potential.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Life is greater than time.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Naglfar—a ship constructed from the fingernails of the dead, sails the end of the world to wage war against the gods.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“trick of the QTNs, she thought. It was repugnant, this absurdity. They’re inside me, making me see these things—Panic lurched within her at the thought of QTNs accumulating in her cells, her brain—but even so she realized this was no hallucination, that the crucified woman was real, as real as she was, as real as the river and the ice and trees. She thought to cut the woman down but was horrified to touch her. Her meter changed from green”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Growing up, Moss thought of her mother as just another Guntown drunk, a wreck, but now she saw her mother was wounded, a perspective that came with age, when everyone settled into the same slew of adulthood, when everyone was wounded and could more easily overlook the wounds of others.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“The totality of human endeavor is nothing when set against the stars.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“One Planck unit past now is the multiverse,”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Moss didn't believe in God, but she increasingly believed in hell.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“What was one life set against every life?”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“We sailed five thousand years,” said Njoku. “And I saw . . . wonders, Shannon. Wonders I will never comprehend.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“We found saved pages. No phone numbers, only codes. We haven’t figured out what most of the codes are, but we did find a few that repeated—143 and 607. My guys tell me codes like these are shorthand for ‘I love you’ or ‘I miss you,’ things like that. Teenagers use them.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“He was bullshitting me maybe, but as we were leaving, he said that if I ever met a traveler, I should capture him, put him in handcuffs, lock him away in solitary. Supermax. Lock him away without a key and keep him alive for as long as possible, alive and comfortable, because the moment he dies or goes back through that wall of doors, back to the real present, the true present, everything I know about life—every memory I have, everything, every person I’d ever known, every atom in existence—will disappear.”
“Blink out,” I said.
“Gone,” said Brock.
“We call that the butterfly in the bell jar,” I said. “It’s happened to people like me. Being held captive in these futures by people who can’t face the awareness of their nonexistence.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Brock found a Sheetz gas station on Route 51, outside Belle Vernon, a twenty-four-hour convenience store.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“Thinking of the scale of this death overwhelmed me, like seeing a mountain but realizing it was a cresting wave.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World

“She was last seen on Friday afternoon leaving her shift at Kmart in Washington, where she’s a cashier.”
― Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World