“Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.-Stephen Dedalus-”

“People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats.”

“That’s crazy,” Gabriel said. “We must be seventy million years in the past.”“Nearly a hundred and twenty-five million,” Ohin said. “It seems far, but time is really interrelational. Every moment is just as far from every other.“Right,” Gabriel said. “Of course. That makes perfect sense.” Sema was right. He was at a breaking point. And he broke right past it. His eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out, falling back into the mattress of the bed.”

“Every person has one particular time in his life when he is more beautiful than he is ever going to be again. For some it is at seven, for others at seventeen or seventy, and as Laura Fleischman read out loud from Shakespeare, I remember thinking that for her it was probably just then.”

“Number four—world domination. Number five—always be myself. Number six—get a haircut. Number seven— convince Kenzie to fall in love with me, get married, and buy a minivan.” He rolled his eyes so far back it’s a wonder he didn’t lose them in his skull.“Now who is being sarcastic?”

“All through my sixties I felt I was still within hailing distance of middle age, not safe on its shores, perhaps, but navigating its coastal waters. My seventieth birthday failed to change this because I managed scarcely to notice it, but my seventy-first did change it. Being 'over seventy' is being old: suddenly I was aground on that fact and saw that the time had come to size it up.”