“Madeline, my wife, never used to wear a watch. She does now, I am told. For a long time, in a very inexact way, I had kept time for her. There was the time before we were married and the time after. There was the time before I was hospitalised and the time after. There was the time she needed me and the time after. And there is now.”

“Before my birth there was infinite time, and after my death, inexhaustible time. I never thought of it before: I'd been living luminously between two eternities of darkness.”

“For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced it with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear; a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.”

“The whole time, I’d never seen, all you had spread before me. The whole time, I’d never seen, all I need was inside me. Now, I feel so different.”

“And from that moment, I watched her. Watched her with different coloured eyes, until the raging energy that coursed through my body finally revealed itself and gave itself a name: envy. For I knew already that something had taken me from me, and had replaced itself with a desperate longing for a time before; a time before fear, a time before shame. And now that knowledge had a voice, and it was a voice that rose from the depths of my years and howled into the night sky like a wounded animal longing for home.”

“Dad, why did you marry a crazy woman?" I asked after the usual pleasantries. "I didn't know she was crazy before I married her. By the time I found out, she was already knocked up and it was too late.”