This, then, is my choice:

I can allow the events of my life to happen to me.

Or I can take those very same actions and make them my own. I can live in my own present, risk failure, be assured of failure.

All he ever knew of her was who he saw every day. All I am is who I am every day. All anyone is to anyone is a series of days.

You want to tell a story? Grow a heart. Grow two. Now, with the second heart, smash the first one into bits. Gross, right? A bloody pulpy liquid mess. Look at it, try to make sense of it. Realize you can't. Because there is no sense. Ask your computer to print out a list of every lie you have ever told. Ask yourself how much of the universe you have ever really seen. Look in the mirror. Are you sure you're you? Are you sure you didn't slip out of yourself in the middle of the night, and someone else slipped into you, without you or you or any of you even noticing?

This is what I say: I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is, you don't have to worry, you can't change the past.

The bad news is, you don't have to worry, no matter how hard you try, you can't change the past.

The universe just doesn't put up with that. We aren't important enough. No one is. Even in our own lives. We're not strong enough, willful enough, skilled enough in chronodiegetic manipulation to be able to just accidentally change the entire course of anything, even ourselves.

When you are thirteen, you spend all your time imagining what it would be like to live in a world where you could pay a robot for sex. And that sex would cost a dollar. And the only obstacle to getting that sex would be making sure you had four quarters.

Then you grow up and it turns out you do live in that kind of world. A world with coin-operated sexbots. And it's not really as great as you thought it would be.

nostalgia, underlying cosmological explanation for

Weak but detectable interaction between two neighboring universes that are otherwise not causally connected.

Manifests itself in humans as a feeling of missing a place one has never been, a place very much like one’s home universe, or as a longing for versions of one’s self that one will never, and can never know.