“it was as if these memories had been hibernating in him, not dead but merely dormant, weathering out, and now they stumbled out of their thousand dens.”

“Who had he been? A failed father, a runaway husband. A son. A packet of unopened letters. He was dead; he was dead.”

“Memory is a house with ten thousand rooms; it is a village slated to be inundated." from "Village 113”

“I used to think...that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn't want to spend it all in one place...But now I know that life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we're all very lucky to be part of something like that.”

“he moved neither forward nor backward in time, but merely endured variations of the same day over and over. Maybe he was the one trapped underwater, under a Plexiglas floor, while the world moved on, men and women checking in and out of rooms, lugging overstuffed suitcases, the soles of their shoes passing lightly above him.”

“Draw the darkness ... and it will point out the light which has been in the paper all the while. Inside this world is folded another." from "Afterworld.”

“Twenty thousand days and nights in one place, each layered and trapped and folded on top of the last, the creases in her hands, the aches between her vertebrae. Embryo, seed coat, endosperm: What is a seed if not the purest kind of memory, a link to every generation that has gone before it?”