“Any story told in this machine age must be a story of fragments, for fragments are all the world has left: interrupted threads of talk at crowded cocktail parties; snatches of poems heard as a radio dial spins through its arc; incomplete commandments reclaimed from shattered stones.”

“There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but fragments of phrases that signaled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.”

“Storytelling--that's not the future. The future, I'm afraid, is flashes and impulses. It's mode up of moments and fragments, and stories won't survive.”

“Every story needs a voice to tell it though, or it goes unheard. So I have to try. I still have enough faith left in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.”

“This is why it's good manners to give gifts in wrappers: so that, for a moment, that beast in all of us that makes us feel alive and keeps us from becoming angels can be satisfied. While a gift is in a wrapper, it can be anything, even that one indescribable thing that will make us happy enough to die in peace.”

“Other lives wind themselves into your own and then leave for distant places or wink out like extinguished lamps, and then all the evidence you have that there was ever any time is a few scribbled words and a few blurred pictures. Then those burn in fire or blow away in wind and you have nothing.”

“She has sold them some of her time for the money she needs to live, but hoarded these moments for herself, and each one is precious, to be wasted as she wishes.”