“Just like ice, lives crack, too. Personalities. Identities. Jimmy Zizmo, crouching over the Packard's wheel has already changed past understanding.”

“Mitchell had answered that, as far as he understood them, mystical experiences were significant only to the extent that they changed a person's conception of reality, and if that changed conception led to a change in behavior and action, a loss of ego.”

“Tessio Zizmo had been a virgin when she married Milton Stephanides at the age of 22. Their engagement,which coincided with the Second World War, had been a chaste affair. My mother was proud of the way she'd managed to simultaneously kindle and snuff my father's flame,keeping him at a low burn for the duration of a global cataclysm.... She didn't surrender until after Japan had.”

“She had just started living like a grown-up and she'd never felt more vulnerable, frightened or confused in her life.”

“The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.”

“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.”

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”