“Books are not about passing time. They're about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wanted to pass the time one could go to New Zealand.”

“One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.”

“When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?”

“One of us had loved the other more perfectly, had watched the other more closely, and one of us listened and the other hadn’t, and one of us held on to the ambition of the one idea far longer than was reasonable, whereas the other, passing a garbage can one night, had casually thrown it away.”

“And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end.”

“And then it went, and time passed properly once more, every second following every other second just like they're meant to.”