19 quotes
You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies—literally beyond counting—and this is only one universe.
The Skin Map (2010)
“If the heat doesn’t kill you,” he mused, “the flies surely will.”
The Skin Map (2010)
Here’s to dodgy adventures with disreputable relatives!
The Skin Map (2010)
But isn’t that hazardous—messing with events?
The Skin Map (2010)
Getting lost is the least of your worries.
The Skin Map (2010)
I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you.
The Skin Map (2010)
A ley line is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they’ve been around since the Stone Age.
The Skin Map (2010)
The very idea of a near-infinite array of universes made his head swim.
The Skin Map (2010)
People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen.
The Skin Map (2010)
You really don’t want to get lost.
The Skin Map (2010)
London had vanished. In place of the lively, thrusting metropolitan conurbation was an empty rural wilderness of damp brown fields under low autumnal skies.
The Skin Map (2010)
You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden.
The Skin Map (2010)
These dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape.
The Skin Map (2010)
Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.
The Skin Map (2010)
Alea iacta est. The die has been cast.
The Skin Map (2010)
Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really—standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot.
The Skin Map (2010)
See here, if a simple act of kindness or generosity, such as buying a loaf of bread for some poor working women, can mean that wholesale death and destruction will be avoided—why, a man would be a monster who had it in his power to alleviate all that suffering yet stood by and did nothing.
The Skin Map (2010)
He was a stranger in a strange land: lost in the cosmos, a man with neither compass nor guide, sitting in a tomb in Egypt surrounded by the dead, with Giles—a man his own age, but separated by class and sensibility and four hundred years—looking to him for answers.
The Skin Map (2010)
We in our present generation stand on the cusp of a new and glorious dawn when mastery of these energies lies fully within our grasp as secret yields to inquiry, which yields to experimentation, which leads to verification and duplication, which, in the final course, leads to knowledge.
The Skin Map (2010)