“Life. Unfair and painful at times. But always moving forward, always shifting,changing, with times relentless passage smoothing down jagged parts until it no longer hurts quite so much to breathe.”

“Isn't it always unfair - death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete.”

“I always thought the purpose of time was to move forward, not backward.”

“Time makes things tolerable. Time gives you perspective on events that shake your world to the core. Time allows you to move forward. But time doesn’t change the pain that sits in your gut.”

“Speaking about time’s relentless passage, Powell’s narrator compares certain stages of experience to the game of Russian Billiards as once he used to play it with a long vanished girlfriend. A game in which, he says, “...at the termination of a given passage of time...the hidden gate goes down...and all scoring is doubled. This is perhaps an image of how we live. For reasons not always at the time explicable, there are specific occasions when events begin suddenly to take on a significance previously unsuspected; so that before we really know where we are, life seems to have begun in earnest at last, and we ourselves, scarcely aware that any change has taken place, are careering uncontrollably down the slippery avenues of eternity."”

“Hurt shouldn’t pile up like this inside of someone. No one should suffocate beneath pain on top of pain. You should have time to breathe, time to scream it out until it doesn’t exist anymore.”