“To Fred, those years seemed to pass like quickly skimming a book and then finding the ending wasn't what he expected. He wished he'd paid more attention to the story.”

“Once more, he was immersing himself in books, reaching the end of long articles, even going back over paragraphs to make sure he'd grasped things. How much more satisfying it was than all that skimming, all that jumping around. At present, he was working his way, deliciously, through a book on Mendel, the father of genetics. A man who might not have spend seven years watching peas, if he'd had the internet.”

“This wasn't going to last anyway. He'd have ended things in another fifty or sixty years with her. He'd never want anything permanent with her so this really didn't bother him. This was fine. This was more than fine, he thought as he drove his first through the wall.”

“The stories didn't seem to care who he was or what he could do; it didn't matter. In their world, he wasn't alone. In their world, a freak like him - like him - could become a hero.”

“Oh God, how did he get to be sixty? How quickly the years had passed! His whole life had passed before he realized it, before he began. He hadn’t lived. What had he done in his life? What had he achieved? Could he measure his happy times? How much? How many? Several days, a few months at best? It was not fair to advance in years without realizing the value of time, not fair that no one drew our attention to the time that was slipping through our fingers by the moment. It was a clever trick: to realize the value of life only just before it ended.”

“Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like "feeling obligated to look serious", and he centers his doubts on "what people expect of a clergyman".”