“He imagined his past gone, along with his future. Death was the understanding of the immediate present: that there is finally nothing else.”

“Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.”

“The past was gone and the future had yet to unfold, and he knew he should focus his life on the present…yet his day-to-day existence suddenly struck him as endless and unbearable.”

“He who does not know the past can never understand the present, and he certainly can do nothing for the future.”

“There's no present. There's only the immediate future and the recent past.”

“The images of his infinite pasts and infinite futures washed over him as he waited, paralyzed, in the present.”