“Yes, we are sure of it. These walls enclose a world. Here is continuity spinning a web from room to room, from year to year. It is safe in this house.”

“The world is like a waiting room in a railway station; it is not your house.You are not going to remain in the waiting room forever.Nothing in the waiting room belongs to you – the furniture, the paintings on the wall .... You use them – you see the painting, you sit on the chair, you rest on the bed – but nothing belongs to you.You are just here for a few ...minutes, or for a few hours at the most, then you will be gone.Yes, what you have brought in with you, into the waiting room, you will take away with you; that’s yours. What have you brought into the world? And the world certainly is a waiting room.The waiting may not be in seconds, minutes, hours, days, it may be in years; but what does it matter whether you wait seven hours, or seventy years?You may forget, in seventy years, that you are just in a waiting room.You may star t thinking perhaps you are the owner, perhaps this is the house you have built.You may start putting your nameplate on the waiting room.”

“Its like a hypnotist put everyone from Seattle into a collective trance. "You are getting sleepy, when you wake up you will want to live only in a Craftsman house, the year won't matter to you, all that will matter is that the walls will be thick, the windows tiny, the rooms dark, the ceilings low, and it will be poorly situated on the lot.”

“In a world of fixed future, life is an infinite corridor of rooms, one room lit at each moment, the next room dark but prepared. We walk from room to room, look into the room that is lit, the present moment, then walk on. We do not know the rooms ahead, but we know we cannot change them. We are spectators of our lives.”

“We moved wordlessly from one room to another, from the room of the dead to the room where time lay in pages everywhere I looked.”

“You have been resident in my house three months?""Yes, sir.""And you came from--?""From Lowood school, in -shire.""Ah! a charitable concern. How long were you there?""Eight years.""Eight years! you must be tenacious of life.”