“I am not from Venus. . . . I am from a small town on the Serbo-Croation border.”

“No. I'm not from outer space or the future. And this is not magic, just science, pure engineering. Magic, religion, the occult --all of it-- they are all excuses to not believe that wonders are possible here on Earth. I don't want to be magic. I want people to understand that things they never even dreamed of are possible. I want to be believed, Louisa.”

“I would like to give you more of my heart,but there is nothing more I can give you. I gave you everything and you crushed it into bits.”

“Catching my breath. I watch them go. I watch them disregard gravity, the ground, and the distance between us. And though an old feeling, one of the wings, haunts my shoulder blades, I stay pinned to the window. I’ve learned that I cannot go with them”

“Wait," I say. "I think you're mistaken. Saying there is no dream is the same as saying everything is a dream. Isn't it? Everyone's a dreamer? Extraordinary things happen all the time even when we're awake. What I meant to suggest to you, if indeed that was me in your dream doing the suggesting, is that there is only one world. This one. The dream is real. The ordinary is the wonderful. The wonderful is the ordinary.”

“I'll just tell you what I remember because memory is as close as I've gotten to building my own time machine.”

“a dream to one day design terrifically odd-shaped swimming pools for a California clientele.”