“Anna woke with the wonderful feeling bad sleepers have when they know they have slept well. As if they have stolen something and got away with it. At these times the memories of what led up to such deep sleep keep their distance for a few seconds and those few seconds are perhaps the only time the world can ever be said to show mercy.”

“It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then...and then -- ah -- we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves.”

“You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day. It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are, for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be.”

“Run through those time measurements again," Aahz grumbled."In seconds, minutes, hours....""Minutes! We've got a few minutes.”

“Have you ever been on a roller coaster, Togawa-kun?You're only riding on it for a few minutes, right? If you spent the entire ride thinking "only so many seconds left... until this ride is over..." then what was the point of riding it in the first place?Nobody knows why we're alive. We don't have the time to bother.”

“But with your life you make a few bad decisions, get unlucky a few times, whatever, but you have to keep going, right?”