How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"I still don't understand how it is that you can't find this guy. You're an angel. Aren't you? Don't you have any angel superpowers—appearing to shepherds in fields where they lay, blowing trumpets? Laser eyes? At the very least, you should have some kind of angel GPS for locating missing people." (15.70)
You can tell Cam probably went to Sunday School, or at least sang some Christmas carols around the house, but he's also clearly not all that religious. If he were maybe he'd have made his guardian angel more powerful—you know, since Dulcie's ultimately his creation.
Quote #8
Maybe there's a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we've ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on the big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find our human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we're an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we're still hardwired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we're all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again- each of us playing our parts in the others' plot-lines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it. Or maybe there's something to what Junior said about those black holes singing. That B-flat? Maybe that's the last sound we make when we join the universe, something to say, I was here. One last "Whoo-hoo!" before we're pulled into the vast, dark unknown and shot out into some other galaxy, some other world, where we have the chance to do it differently. I don't know. It's something to think about, though. (46.41)
Compare the mood of this quote to earlier in the story when Cam sarcastically lists the major world religion's views on the afterlife. Doesn't he sound much more comfortable with the fact that he doesn't have any answers here, and even with the idea that no one does?
Quote #9
We've left the moment. It's gone. We're somewhere else now, and that's okay. We've still got that other moment with us somewhere, deep in our memory, seeping into our DNA. And when our cells get scattered, whenever that happens, this moment will still exist in them. Those cells might be the building block of something new. A planet or star or a sunflower, a baby. Maybe even a cockroach. Who knows? Whatever it is, it'll be a part of us, this thing right here and now, and we'll be a part of it. (46.51)
Here's another example of how Bray uses both religion (the Buddhist belief of reincarnation) and science to explain something metaphysical. It just works somehow, doesn't it?