“Yes, you have been away a very long time.' 'Oh, centuries and centuries; so long,' she said, 'that I'm sure I'm dead and buried and this dear old place is heaven.”

“Are you OLD?""No. I'm only twelve. But I've been that for a long time.”

“I'm sure I'm not Ada for her hair goes in such long ringlets, and mine does'nt go in ringlets at all; and I'm sure I'm not Mabel, for I know all sorts of things, and she's she and I'm I, and-oh dear, how puzzling it all is! i'll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is tweleve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is-oh dear! I shall never get to tewnty at that rate! However, the Multiplication- Table doesn't signify: let's try geography. London is the capital of Paris, and Paris is the capital of Rome, and Rome-no, that's all wrong, I'm certain! I must have been changed for Mabel!”

“The ritual works. The forms overcome doubts. We have learned over the centuries to weave meaning around emptiness and pain. A meaning and a pattern. We have been practising that for a very long time.”

“The photograph is in my hand. It is the photograph of a man and a woman. They are at an amusement park, in 1959. [...] I'm tired of looking at the photograph now. I open my fingers. It falls to the sand at my feet. I am going to look at the stars. They are so far away, and their light takes so long to reach us... All we ever see of stars are their old photographs. [...] It's October, 1985. I'm basking in the two-million-year-old light of Andromeda. I can see the supernova that Ernst Hartwig discovered in 1885, a century ago. It scintillates, a wink intended for the Trilobites, all long dead. Supernovas are where gold forms; the only place. All gold comes from supernovas.”

“We'd been apart so long--I'd been dead so long," she said in English. "I thought surely you'd built a new life, with no room in it for me. I'd hoped that.""My life is nothing but room for you." I said. "It could never be filled by anyone but you.”