“As the clockwork of the millennia moved a notch in front of their eyes, it had taken their thoughts from small things and reminded them of how vulnerable they were to time.”

“He had known in times of the greatest misery or danger that his dreams of home, in which all things seemed beautiful, were in essence his longing for the woman for whom he had been made. That was how, as a soldier, he had seen it, and it was how he had come through.”

“Because no windows were open and the air was so still and cold that the trees dared not move for fear of encountering more of it than they had to, Christiana thought that she had entered a city of the dead.”

“Perhaps he was a fool, but he thought that if a work were truly great you would only have to read it once and you would be stolen from yourself, desperately moved, changed forever.”

“Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altovini was saying, half with longing, half with delight, "These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds."In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living. ”

“Now that music is faithfully reproducible, musicians are not needed as once they were. And music itself has changed. Though small cadres of classicists keep the sacred and ineffable alive, they are under siege by coarse generations whose music is hardly as musical as a bus engine or a chain saw. Something must have occurred during their mothers' pregnancies. How else is it possible to explain that playing Bach keeps them away from public spaces the way iron spikes drive pigeons from cathedral ledges?”

“Your time is a good time, and though I have to leave, you can stay. How lucky you are to be in the city just before it opens its eyes upon a golden age.”