“You can kill time in a number of ways but it always depends on the kind of time you're fighting: some time is unkillable, immortal”

“Suicide is what everyone young thinks they'll do before they get old. But they hardly ever get round to it. They just don't want to commit themselves in that way. When you're young and you look ahead, time ends in mist at twenty-five. 'Old won't happen to me', you say. But old does. Oh, old does. Old always gets you in the end.”

“If you can fight, you don’t have to fight. And you don’t have to cower. And girls like that, whatever they say.”

“Richard's bookshelves weren't alphabetized. He never had time to alphabetize them. He was always too busy- looking for books he couldn't find.”

“...So in his own way Guy Clinch confronted the central question of his time, a question you saw being asked and answered everywhere you looked, in every headline and haircut: if, at any moment, nothing might matter, then who said that nothing didn't matter already?”

“Life does rhyme: it rhymes all the time.”

“It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tiredness of gravity- gravity, which wants you down in the center of the earth.”