“What is time to a water rat? What is time to the river? Only we humans obsess over days and minutes, hours and seasons.”

“The only equality that exists on earth is time. We all have exactly 24 hours in a day. How we choose to spend those hours is what separates us.”

“Time is an equal opportunity employer. Each human being has exactly the same number of hours and minutes every day. Rich people can't buy more hours. Scientists can't invent new minutes. And you can't save time to spend it on another day. Even so, time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire tomorrow.”

“I've known time to stretch out like rings expanding outward over water; I've also known it to rush by with such force it leaves me dizzy. But until today I've never known it to do both at the same time. The minutes seem to swell around me, to stifle me with their sluggishness... At the same time. I'm terrified when I see how many hours have gone by... and even as each minute seems to take an hour, each hour seems to fly by in a minute.”

“What is wrong with life is human memory, she thought. What is the point of life and history--all that human beings sacrifice and endure, overcome and rejoice over--if we do not remember? What point are the centuries, years, months, hours, minutes, if they slip through our fingers, if we learn nothing?”

“A day out of season, stopping the monotonous count of summer days. Stopping, too, one's own summer routine, so that, looking out on the gray skies, one says not only, 'What time of year is it?' but, 'What time of life am I in? Where am I? What am I doing?”