Quotes from Robert Charles Wilson's "Julian: A Christmas Story"

I collect some quotes from this novella here:

1. “I’ve heard of DNA. It’s the life force of the secular ancients. And it’s a myth.”
   “Like men walking on the moon?”
   “Exactly.”
2. "DNA isn’t changeless. It struggles to remember itself, but it never remembers itself perfectly."
3. Musings by Adam on seeing pictures of lunar landing in an old book: "Their clothing was white and ridiculously bulky, like the winter clothes of the Inuit, and they wore helmets with golden visors that disguised their faces. I supposed it must be very cold on the moon, if explorers required such cumbersome protection. They must have arrived in winter. However, there was no ice or snow in the neighborhood."
   "If the moon was such a cold place, I reasoned, people residing on its surface would be forced to build fires to keep warm. There seemed to be no wood on the moon, judging by the photographs, so they must have resorted to coal or peat. I went to the window and examined the moon minutely for any sign of campfires, pit mining, or other lunar industry. But I could see none."
4. "every Christian church in America was required to have the formal approval of the Board of Registrars of the Dominion of Jesus Christ on Earth".
   "In America we are entitled by the Constitution to worship at any church we please, as long as it is a genuine Christian congregation and not some fraudulent or satanistic sect. The Board exists to make that distinction. Also to collect fees and tithes to further its important work."
5. 'Einstein, and his insistence that no particular point of view of was more privileged than any other: in other words his “general relativity,” and its claim that the answer to the question “What is real?” begins with the question “Where are you standing?”'
6. 'was I an incarnation of a molecule of DNA, “imperfectly remembering,” as Julian had said, an ape, a fish, and an amoeba?'
7. On Heaven: '"Flaxie, who was five, had believed in it fervently—imagined it was something like a meadow, with wildflowers blooming, and a perpetual summer picnic underway—and if that childish belief soothed her in her extremity, then it served a purpose more noble than truth."'
8. 'vices and wickedness of the Secular Era, some of which still lingered, he said, in the cities of the East—irreverence, irreligiosity, skepticism, occultism, depravity.'