“And marking off time struck me as something like counting empty spaces—spaces you know can't ever be filled.”

“Time is something that fills the empty spaces of life”

“His absence will haunt their hallways, and he will be a space they can't fill. And then time will pass, and the hole will be gone, like when an organ is removed and the body's fluids flow into the space it leaves. Humans can't tolerate emptiness for long.”

“I don't think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.”

“All my life, I've been trying to fill an emptiness inside. But that emptiness...I've built myself around it. Filling it in would be like filling in the empty space within a cathedral.”

“Six years is plenty long enough to soothe the tearing anguish of...death, but maybe no amount of time is enough to soothe something that is no longer there. Something like an emptiness that can never be filled because it's only a bit of space carved out of air.”