“I learned that the day "The Viper's Drag" slipped from between my fingers. But whatever might be lost or broken or forgotten is nothing compared to the miraculous rebirth that occurs every time the needle hits the groove. Here is Fats Waller Himself, not dead but present, so present that he overwhelms the well-ordered precincts of the living room. The sound sprawls. What vibrates here has more life than any room.”

“One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time; it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present hope, that the past has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. Another, that the history of the universe — and in it our lives and the most tenuous detail of our lives — is the scripture produced by a subordinate god in order to communicate with a demon. Another, that the universe is comparable to those cryptographs in which not all the symbols are valid and that only what happens every three hundred nights is true. Another, that while we sleep here, we are awake elsewhere and that in this way every man is two men.”

“It occurred to Mo that he didn't have any pictures of himself as a boy. Every photo he owned, every memento of his life, was from after. It was as if he had been born the day he left. He had gone out from here and invented himself.”

“The InfiniteIt was always dear to me, this solitary hill,and this hedgerow here, that closes out my view,from so much of the ultimate horizon.But sitting here, and watching here, in thought,I create interminable spaces,greater than human silences, and deepestquiet, where the heart barely fails to terrify.When I hear the wind, blowing among these leaves,I go on to compare that infinite silencewith this voice, and I remember the eternaland the dead seasons, and the living present,and its sound, so that in this immensitymy thoughts are drowned, and shipwreck seems sweetto me in this sea.”

“The past is behind, learn from it. The future is ahead, prepare for it. The present is here, live it.”

“They did not talk about the larger present, so circumscribed, so uncontrollable. Their little present was two bodies and a bed, and that was the entirety of time and place: them, there, in their little room, awkward, laughing, happy, warm, tentative, surrendering, overwhelmed, alarmed, astounded, shivering, subsiding, asleep, awake, getting the hang of it, learning, loving, redeemed. Happy.”