“He said, "A ring is a halo for your finger. From now on, we no longer cast two shadows, we cast one.”

“Life is maybe like deep-sea fishing. We wake up in the morning, we cast our nets into the water, an, if we are lucky, at day's end we will have netted one-- maybe two-- small fish. Occasionally we will net a seahorse or sometimes a shark-- or a life preserver or an iceberg, or a monster. And in our dreams at night we assess our Catch of the Day-- the treasures of this long, slow process of accumulation...”

“We can no longer create the feeling of an era...of time being particular to one spot in time.”

“Abe: Wise hermit cast adrift on asteroid for thousands of years; has developed odd code languages for everyday actions; lonely but not bitter; his heart is cryogenically frozen, and he must search the universe pursuing the Thawer.”

“And in his heart, I think, he's now learned what I came to believe, which is, as I've said all along, that the sun may burn brightly, and the faces of children may be plump and achingly sweet, but in the air we breathe, in the water we drink and in the food we share, there will always be darkness in this world.”

“I wonder that all things seem to be from hell these days: dates, jobs, parties, weather…Could the situation be that we no longer believe in that particular place? Or maybe we were all promised heaving in our lifetimes, and what we ended up with can’t help but suffer in comparison.”

“As suburban children we floated at night in swimming pools the temperature of blood; pools the color of Earth as seen from outer space. We would float and be naked—pretending to be embryos, pretending to be fetuses—all of us silent save for the hum of the pool filter. Our minds would be blank and our eyes closed as we floated in warm waters, the distinction between our bodies and our brains reduced to nothing—bathed in chlorine and lit by pure blue lights installed underneath diving boards. Sometimes we would join hands and form a ring like astronauts in space; sometimes when we felt more isolated in our fetal stupor we would bump into each other in the deep end, like twins with whom we didn’t even know we shared a womb. ”