“It was as if we were having two different conversations. Which wasn’t that surprising after all, as we were clearly having two entirely different experiences of breaking up. His was soft, cushioned; Jude and his friends had broken his fall. Mine was cold, empty and bereft. I was freefalling in space and time, with nobody standing by to stop me hurtling headlong into obscurity.”
“Wonderland was all we had in common, after all; Wonderland was what was denied the two of us. I had denied him his; he had denied me mine.”
“By 7:28, all the guests had arrived, and there were three empty seats: one for Eve, who had yet to show up, another for John, who would have a seat after he gave his daughter away, and a third that would remain empty, save for the ball of soft white yarn with two silver knitting needles in it.”
“...if we consider the difference between William Henry Jackson packing in his cameras by mule, and the person stepping out of his car to take a picture with an Instamatic, it becomes clear how some of our space has vanished; if the time it takes to cross space is a way by which we define it, then to arrive at a view of space 'in no time' is to have denied its reality.”
“It seems to me that we do live in two worlds... there is this physical one, which is coherant, and there is the spiritual one, which to the average man with his flashes of religious experience, is very often incoherant. This experience of having two worlds to live in all the time, or not all the time, is a vital one, and is what living is like.”
“We were both at a delicate age, when the mere fact that we went to different schools and lived two train stops apart was all it took for me to feel our worlds had changed completely”