“Don't waste your time on life.”

“But maybe they understood more about life than I did. From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing, I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar.”

“I hadn't gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time traveling. In this life we grow backwards.”

“Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.”

“It's often said that a traumatic experience early in life marks a person forever, pulls her out of line, saying, "Stay there. Don't move.”

“Chunks of his life fell away, so that while we were moving ahead in time, he was moving back.”

“Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough. ”