“You act like your whole life was one long January afternoon." Lawrence said. "It wouldn't do any good to go around with my head in the clouds.”

“There's nothing we can do about your pants-mine probally wouldn't fit,and it wouldn't do for me to go around pantless, much as it would be the best day of your life.”

“You have your whole life ahead of you," my mother told me, "don't spend all your time in the past." It's good advice, I know it is, but the past has its own ideas. It can follow you around with a life of its own, casting a long shadow.”

“And have your mother put my head on a stake? Do you have any notion what that would do to my handsome good looks?”

“Consider cotton prices," Malcolm said. "There are good records of cotton prices going back more than a hundred years. When you study fluctuations in cotton prices, you find that the graph of price fluctuations in the course of a day looks basically like the graph for a week, which looks basically like the graph for a year, or for ten years. And that's how things are. A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there... And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.”

“My whole life revolves around your absence until I can't remember what I do, what I know. Or where I go.”