Colder by the hour, more dead with every breath.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed

I thought of how infinity is not a large number. It is something else entirely. It is boundlessness. You cannot travel faster than the speed of light. You must and will die. You cannot escape these boundaries. But the miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.

I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.

I looked over at Augustus Waters, who looked back at me. You could almost see through his eyes they were so blue. "There will come a time," I said, "when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed for that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.

There comes a time when we realize that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow- that, in short, we are all going.