“There are some moments you feel like you'll remember forever. Rare, still moments when everything is NOW, as if everything has been stopped and hushed so that you can take it all in. When things are just as they should be, and everyone is one your side, and the whole world makes sense [...] Suddenly, there's peace, perfection, happiness. In that one, tiny moment of time.”

“But just then, for that fraction of time, it seems as though all things are possible. You can look across the limitations of your own life, and see that they are really nothing. In that moment when time stops, it is as though you know you could undertake any venture, complete it and come back to yourself, to find the world unchanged, and everything just as you left it a moment before. And it's as though knowing that everything is possible, suddenly nothing is necessary.”

“There are times when you stand on the cusp of moments so huge, you know you'll remember them forever. This is that moment for me and for Ryan.”

“Have you ever had one of those moments when time just freezes? Youknow, when the world suddenly goes deathly still, and you could hear apin drop, and the squishing sound your heart makes is so loud in yourears you feel like youre drowning in blood, and you stand there in thatsuspended moment and die a thousand deaths, but not really, and themoment passes and dumps you out on the other side of it, with yourmouth hanging open, and an erased blackboard where your mind used tobe?”

“You can render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, but if you don't keep from Caesar that which is yours, Caesar will take some, and than take some more, and if you don't put a stop to it, though you won't lose everything - you can't lose everything; there's things he can't take, at least one or two - a time will soon come when you'll think you've lost everything, when you'll think all is Caesar's, and by then you'll be too weak to take what's yours back, too tired to remember what was yours to begin with, and you'll end up, perversely, scheming for his leavings and, even more perversely, grateful when you get them.”

“My heart clutched - it was one of those moments when you feel time is a rug that's been yanked out from under you; everything around you has changed so gradually that it is only all at one you look up and realize how different your life has become.”