“Everything that flickered could be made permanent. That was what drew him to photography, what made every painstaking step worth it: the permanence of the image. That was what fascinated him, the working against time...”

“She once complained that her stories were like ‘birds bred in cages,’ but that concentrated atmosphere, that claustrophobic hothouse of emotion, was her talent. Her stories were little masterpieces of compression: she succinctly contained whole lifetimes in a few pages, every moment loaded with as much as it could bear.”

“A woman whose smile is open and whose expression is glad has a kind of beauty no matter what she wears.”

“Because that's the point, nothing is ever permanent. We're just being brainwashed to think there isn't more out there. Here's the truth: your situation is never permanent. It's what you make it. Life isn't solid, it's fluid. It changes. You say we're stuck but that's a hopeless way to look at it. It's like saying we should give up.”

“You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.”

“It's not convenience that bothers me, it's people's obsession with saving time. Everything's a race. I just don't get who or what we're constantly racing against.”

“You can use power for good or bad, for control or freedom. You grew up watching your dad abuse it one way and it made you take the opposite direction. That's what we all think. Everything's about balance. That's what sustains life. Maybe your role is to keep your dad in check?”