“That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”

“It seemed not only as though they had everything figured out but were balancing it in their palms as well. The world was borrowing its time from them in order for anything outside of their lives to take place.”

“For how many generations now had his people been turning their backs on things? How long had they sat in their living rooms and watched other people die?”

“People think that children don't know anything. It's enough to make you wonder if grownups were ever children once upon a time.”

“My name is growing all the time, and I’ve lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of the things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time to say anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.”

“Annabel was trying to hide her sword under her suit jacket without much success. People were staring...And then they weren't. There were no people, as if the whole town had forgotten as one that these streets and this square had ever existed. The deserted street they were racing down seemed darker than the busy street they had left, as if light was lost with memory, as if they were running into oblivion, and Mae didn't care as long as they got there in time.”