“People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. . . . Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.”

“Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains.”

“By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains. It had happened with Michela and then with Alice and again now. He recognized them this time: those seconds were there, and he would never make a mistake again.”

“there are very few who can think, but every man wants to have an opinion; and what remains but to take it ready-made from others, instead of forming opinions for himself?”

“There were two things that prevent us from achieving our dreams: believing them to be impossible or seeing those dreams made possible by some sudden turn of the wheel of fortune, when you least expected it. [...]People want to change everything and, at the same time, want it all to remain the same”

“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”