“The future came and went in the mildly discouraging way that futures do.”

“If we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.”

“Dreams are composed of many things, my son. Of images and hopes, of fears and memories. Memories of the past, and memories of the future...”

“Bod was thrilled. He imagined a future in which he could read everything, in which all stories could be opened and discovered.”

“Here: an exercise in choice. Your choice. One of these tales is true.She lived through the war. In 1959 she came to America. She now lives in a condo in Miami, a tiny French woman with white hair, with a daughter and a grand-daughter. She keeps herself to herself and smiles rarely, as if the weight of memory keeps her from finding joy.Or that's a lie. Actually the Gestapo picked her up during a border crossing in 1943, and they left her in a meadow. First she dug her own grave, then a single bullet to the back of the skull.Her last thought, before that bullet, was that she was four months' pregnant, and that if we do not fight to create a future there will be no future for any of us.There is an old woman in Miami who wakes, confused, from a dream of the wind blowing the wildflowers in a meadow.There are bones untouched beneath the warm French earth which dream of a daughter's wedding. Good wine is drunk. The only tears shed are happy ones.”

“He was numb: heart-numb, mind-numb, soul-numb. And the numbness, he realized, went a long way down, and a long way back.”

“I have a feeling,’ he said, ‘I have a feeling that we were meant to be together. That we have fought the good fight, side by side, in the past or in the future, I do not know. I am a rational man, but I have learned the value of a good companion, and from the moment I clapped eyes on you, I knew I trusted you as well as I do myself. Yes, I want you with me.”