“It was in a way a comforting idea; if there was all the time in the world, then the happenings of a given moment became less important.”

“But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.”

“...well, if women's work was never done, why trouble about how much of it wasn't being accomplished at any given moment?”

“Roger became aware, in a subliminally marital way, that his wife was disgruntled at the thought of being left behind to organize the harvest-a filthy, exhausting job at the best of times-whilst he frolicked with a squad of his co-religionists in the romantically exciting metropolis of Cross Creek, population two hundred.”

“I love you, a nighean donn. I have loved ye from the moment I saw ye, I will love ye ’til time itself is done, and so long as you are by my side, I am well pleased wi’ the world.”

“More than most men, he valued his name-I only hoped that given time, it would once more have value.”

“It gave him the same odd sense of dislocation, though; that sense of losing some valuable part of himself that could not survive the passage back to daily life. Each time, the passage became more difficult.”