“All the events of his life were compressing to singularity: one night, one hour.”

“There is a time when death is an event, an ad-venture, and as such mobilizes, interests, activates, tetanizes. And then one day it is no longer an event, it is another duration, compressed, insignificant, not narrated, grim, without recourse: true mourning not susceptible to any narrative dialectic.”

“From up above, in a plane passing over, you’d just see one little light in all this dark, with no idea of the lives that were being lived within it, and in the house beside, and beside that one. So much happening in the world, night and day, hour by hour. It was no wonder we were meant to sleep, if only to check out of it for a little while.”

“The clock strikes off the hollow half-hours of all the life that is left to you, one by one.”

“I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs”

“One of the advantages of reading books is that you get to play with someone else's imaginary friends, at all hours of the night.”