The hazard of living in a place where you had so much history — so much pain and so much rage and so much love — was that every item could turn on you in a flash.

I am so changeable, being everything by turns and nothing long - such a strange melange of good and evil.

Language changes over time. Meaning twists. Mistakes compound with each transcribing. Even those stalwart sentinels of perfection — numbers — can, in a single careless moment, be profoundly altered.

It was the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, he reminded himself. He had heard many people say that on TV and on the outré video clips floating in cyberspace, which added a further, new-technology depth to his addiction. There were no rules any more. And in the Age of Anything-Can-Happen, well, anything could happen. Old friends could become new enemies and traditional enemies could be your new besties or even lovers. It was no longer possible to predict the weather, or the likelihood of war, or the outcome of elections. A woman might fall in love with a piglet, or a man start living with an owl. A beauty might fall asleep and, when kissed, wake up speaking a different language and in that new language reveal a completely altered character. A flood might drown your city. A tornado might carry your house to a faraway land where, upon landing, it would squash a witch. Criminals could become kings and kings be unmasked as criminals. A man might discover that the woman he lived with was his father’s illegitimate child. A whole nation might jump off a cliff like swarming lemmings. Men who played presidents on TV could become presidents. The water might run out. A woman might bear a baby who was found to be a revenant god. Words could lose their meanings and acquire new ones. The world might end, as at least one prominent scientist- entrepreneur had begun repeatedly to predict. An evil scent would hang over the ending. And a TV star might miraculously return the love of a foolish old coot, giving him an unlikely romantic triumph which would redeem a long, small life, bestowing upon it, at the last, the radiance of majesty.

The idea that the future is unpredictable is undermined every day by the ease with which the past is explained.

Nothing said in words ever came out quite even. Things in words got twisted and ran together, instead of staying straight and fitting together.

How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.

If so much of what we call life is mostly created by our thoughts and beliefs, then much of what we take to be real — all the constructs, rules, and “shoulds” of the culturescape — is nothing more than an accidental tweak of history.

No matter how explicit the pledge, people will turn and twist the text to suit their own purpose

That's how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously. (p.175)

the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

What we don't understand we can make mean anything.

"We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the myth of an "end of history". In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return."

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.