The Reality Dysfunction (Night's Dawn, #1)

by Peter F. Hamilton

If life has a purpose, they speculate, then it must be a journey to complete understanding.

We can look at the whole concept of God and spirituality from a vantage point built on logic and physics. Under such an intensive scientific scrutiny, religion always fails.

The universe is an entirely natural phenomenon, if extraordinarily complex. It was not created by an external act of will.

In actuality, any religion is dependent solely on the strength of conviction in its followers.

I don’t see the need to pray to an unseen deity for anything. I know what I am. I know why I am. You humans seem to delight in building your own complications.

There is an old saying, that the boy is the father of the man. So when he has had his fill of adventure and realizes he will never be that man, that he is a sterile child, his identity will fade out of the multiplicity into the overall personality.

No. Death is the loss of hope, everything else is merely despair.

Banks sat back and made money, everyone else worked for a living.

A man could sit back every evening and see what he’d achieved. It was a tremendous feeling.

If there was an omnipotent god, why did he make life so full of pain?

No. We are all responsible for ourselves. She knows that as well as you do. All individuals can ever do is share happiness wherever they can find it.