“IMPROVIDENCEThe other lives I might have ledAll now might as well beDead. Survived by no one.Barren, without issue of any sort:This withered bud, failedIn art and love. With no time leftTo change my course. But time enoughfor infinite remorse.”

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

“Gradually my whole concept of time changed until I thought of a month as having twenty-five days of humanness and five others when I might just as well have been an animal in a steel trap.”

“...my boredom might be described as a malady affecting external objects and consisting of a withering process; an almost instantaneous loss of vitality--just as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.”

“Currently she was midway through a bittersweet David Nicholls novel that any other time might well have made her self-indulgently reflective.”

“But really there was no hurry. It is time to love, he had said downstairs. And time was not always just one second long or even one minute or one hour. Those were artificial divisions, imposed by humankind. Time was infinite. And it was time to love......Even infinity had an end. They had loved. And somehow having loved was quite as beautiful as loving. For of course there was no real end to it. Infinity might have an end, but love did not.”