“As you know, I have always been curious about our immortality... how it feels to live on and on through time....I need speculate no longer, I have sampled eternity in Miss Campbell's fifth period "social studies" class. Three days on the concept of "manifest destiny," Vasile. THREE DAYS. I yearned to stand up, rip her lecture notes from her pallid hands, and scream, 'Yes, America expanded westward! Is that not logical, given that Europeans settled on the Eastern shore? What else were they to do? Advance vainly into the sea?”

“How will I survive this missing? How do others do it? People die all the time. Every day. Every hour. There are families all over the world staring at beds that are no longer slept in, shoes that are no longer worn. Families that no longer have to buy a particular cereal, a kind of shampoo. There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds. For years. For their whole lives. I don't believe time heals. I don't want it to. If I heal, doesn't that mean I've accepted the world without her?”

“How did you learn all this?"Vic sighed. "See, while you spend all your time making out with Balthazar, and Raquel stays holed up with her art projects, and Ranulf's off studying his Norse myths again, i do something else. Something crazy. Something strange. I call it 'talking to other people.' Through this miraculous process, I am sometimes able to learn facts about two or three other human beings in a single day. Scientists plan to study my method."~Vic”

“And that I miss her, that I need her, and this kind of missing, this kind of need, the kind of emptiness it leaves behind is worse than waking up one day and finding the whole world has collapsed in on itself, that I was over longer before it was.”

“Several notes were missing. They had always been missing, except for two that I had levered out with a poker when three...The anticipated thrill of a missing G or an E Flat was like a good joke, told again and again, always fresh. I believe that my present feeling for silences and emptinesses dates from those sing-songs, the awaited non-note on the beat.”

“Yes. Weary.” He eyed me speculatively, smoothing his beard with a hand. “You have a gift for words.It’s one of the reasons you ended up with Elodin, I expect.”I didn’t say anything to that. I must have said it quite loudly too, because Dal gave me a curious look.“How are your studies progressing with Elodin?” he asked casually.”