“Die while I can still remember who I am, who I used to be.”

“The mountains are as I have always remembered them, the first light of the morning melting down their flanks.”

“She saw the stubborn set of my face. "I've never felt blessed," I said. "There must be free will to choose. Do you know the poem about the two roads, and the one not taken?" Yes. That has always amused me, because who created the two roads in the first place?" It was a question I had never considered.”

“I have become a collapsing star, pulling everything around it, even the light, into an ever-expanding void. Once I lose all ability to communicate with the world outside myself, nothing will be left but what I remember. My memories will be like a sandbar, cut off from the shore by the incoming tide. In time they will become submerged, inaccessible to me. The prospect terrified me. For what is a person without memories? A ghost, trapped between worlds, without an identity, with no future, no past.”

“A garden is composed of a variety of clocks, Aritomo had once told me. Some of them run faster than the others, and some of them move slower than wee can ever perceive. I only understood this fully long after I had been his apprentice.”

“We were like two moths around a candle, I thought, circling closer and closer to the flame, waiting to see whose wings would catch fire first.”

“Some element in the air between us changed, as though a wind that had been blowing gently had come to an abrupt stillness.”