“In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.”

“silent desperation of everything they never said - gaps and absences in every conversation, the past circumscribing the present, the future hemming in the past.”

“Does it matter? In memory, in story, in the end, we can remake our lives any way we need. To be surprised, truly and utterly surprised by what came into your life - this, Winkler was learning, was the true gift.”

“Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.”

“We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.”

“had felt time settle over itself, imbricate and fix into place the vertigo of future aligning with the present.”

“Life is wonderful and strange...and it’s also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It’s hilarious and it’s deadening. It’s a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....What interests me—and interests me totally—is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives—which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids’ LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway—against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe? How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn’t that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too?”