“From the depths of hell,So far I fell,A deal made with the devil,After all the dust had settled,There's an hourglass of time,Counting down all of our lives,And with every grain of sand,Time is slipping through my hands.”

“Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass...if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass...slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own...structure.”

“I'm living under water. Everything seems slow and far away. I know there's a world up there, a sunlit quick world where time runs like dry sand through an hourglass, but down here, where I am, air and sound and time and feeling are thick and dense.”

“And my eyes! I see through hourglass pupils and therefore I see time-as it affects all things. Even as I look at you now, Tanis," the mage whispered, "I see you dying, slowly, by inches. And so I see every living thing.”

“Just remember: If one bird carried every grain of sand, grain by grain, across the ocean, by the time he got them all on the other side, that would only be the beginning of eternity. ”

“The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”