“He says to me, Ranulph, he says... that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here.”

“...why bother remembering a past that cannot be made into a present?”

“They say you can't escape your past, but I don't believe that. I believe you escape it every day, over and over again, always cognizant of the difference between past and present”

“... some people - think only the present is real. The past and the future don't even exist. ... And some people say that the future and the present are made up of a lot of different worlds. Each world comes out of a different set of circumstances that might have happened in the past.”

“How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity.”

“Afterwards, he just sat, happy to live in the past. The drink made past happy things contemporary with the present, as if they were still going on, contemporary even with the future as if they were about to happen again.”