“The changes are coming fast and blind now, and in your skull sits an hourglass with a grain size hole through which numb seconds are sliding.”

“Think of your life as an hourglass. You know there are thousands of grains of sand in the top of the hourglass; and they all pass slowly and evenly through the narrow neck in the middle. Nothing you or I could do would make more than one grain of sand pass through this narrow neck without impairing the hourglass. You and I and everyone else are like this hourglass...if we do not take [tasks] one at a time and let them pass...slowly and evenly, then we are bound to break our own...structure.”

“The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.”

“It is like a skull, which still has holes for eyes, but no longer sight.”

“Siobhan also says that if you close your mouth and breathe out loudly through your nose it can mean that you are relaxed, or that you are bored, or that you are angry and it all depends on how much air comes out of your nose and how fast and what shape your mouth is when you do it and how you are sitting and what you just said before and hundreds of other things which are too complicated to work out in a few seconds.”

“Maybe happiness was an hourglass already running out, the grains tipping, sifting past each other. Maybe it was a state of mind.”