“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.”

“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.”

“Arthur takes a seat beside her. The colored lights bounce off his eyeglasses and Louisa loses all interest in time-travel technology. The future and the past disappear. All she feels is the tension between two bodies. How his head had been in her lap. How her hand had been wrapped inside his. The tension leaks down her throat. The belly. The muscle. And something forged. A weld. A softness. A vagueness that is rather quickly being sharpened into a point aimed directly at Louisa's heart.”

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

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

“I've been forgotten here. Left alone talking to lightning storms, studying the mysterious patterns the dust of dead people makes as it floats through the last light of day.”

“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.”