“The day it happened, the week after it happened-those were not times I wanted to go back to. How I felt like I was trapped in a chamber of my own noise. Sitting in class and not being there at all. Sitting in a chair and fragmenting at the same time. Clutching to the random facts. Thinking the concept of a fact was itself a fiction. Because we live in a blur. All of us live in a blur.”

“Time was a dazzling lie, a magician worth a bird in his hat. The truth, I felt certain, was that everything happened at once. How old was I? I was every age at the same time. All the days of our lives were today.”

“I'm not sure what happened now; it's all a blur. I haven't seen Antonio in over a week. He never came back to school. I never talked to him after that horrible day. I'm a zombie - I eat, go to school, and play the harp. I am a zombie harpist.”

“And then all of a sudden I realized how little time we have. Like on the earth, I mean. And when I say we, I mean everyone. It was a profound realization, and I suddenly had to share this fact with Mary. I know that sounds insane because of how it was already after midnight and all the other crazy things that had happened that day, but it was one of the most important feelings I’ve ever had – my chest was swelling and everything. It felt like there were only so many hours left on the earth – that’s the hardest part about being alive.”

“I wanted to go on sitting there, not talking, not listening to the others, keeping the moment precious for all time, because we were peaceful all of us, we were content and drowsy even as the bee who droned above our heads. In a little while it would be different, there would come tomorrow, and the next day and another year. And we would be changed perhaps, never sitting quite like this again. Some of us would go away, or suffer, or die, the future stretched away in front of us, unknown, unseen, not perhaps what we wanted, not what we planned. This moment was safe though, this could not be touched. Here we sat together, Maxim and I, hand-in-hand, and the past and the future mattered not at all. This was secure, this funny little fragment of time he would never remember, never think about again…For them it was just after lunch, quarter-past-three on a haphazard afternoon, like any hour, like any day. They did not want to hold it close, imprisoned and secure, as I did. They were not afraid.”

“Something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible.”