“To say a person is a happy person or an unhappy person is ridiculous. We are a thousand different kinds of people every hour.”

“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?”

“Here's what I mean by the miracle of language. When you're falling into a good book, exactly as you might fall into a dream, a little conduit opens, a passageway between a reader's heart and a writer's, a connection that transcends the barriers of continents and generations and even death ... And here's the magic. You're different. You can never go back to being exactly the same person you were before you disappeared into that book.”

“Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.”

“A travel website says that there are 280 fountains in Rome, but it seems as if there are more:...Remove them and there is no present tense, no circulatory system, nor dreams to balance the waking hours. No Rome.”

“For Winkler each hour was another hour between Cleveland and Anchorage, between who they were becoming and who they had been.”

“To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.”