“She never sent the castle to sleep”, said Granny, “that’s just an old wife’s tale. She just stirred up time a little. It’s not as hard as people think, everyone does it all the time. It’s like rubber, is time, you can stretch it to suit yourself.”Magrat was about to say: That’s not right, time is time, every second lasts a second, that’s its job. Then she recalled weeks that had flown past and afternoons that had lasted forever. Some minutes had lasted hours, some hours had gone past so quickly she hadn’t been aware they’d gone past at all.“But that’s just people’s perception, isn’t it?”“Oh yes”, said Granny, “of course it is, it all is, what difference does that make?”

“We thought all the time that we were passing through time when we really weren't, when we never have. We've just been moving along with time. We said, there's another second gone, there's another minute and another hour and another day, when, as a matter of fact the second or the minute or the hour was never gone. It was the same one all the time. It had just moved along and we had moved with it.”

“Yeah – Sure I rememberMatter of fact it was just last SeptemberShe still calls it the fall to rememberLittle Heather when it all came togetherYou remember the first time you met her?She cried when it rained and blamed the weatherBut inside she strained with suicide lettersThe kind of cold you couldn’t warm with a sweater Hardly lasted past December She said she was headed down to defeat That’s the last you’d seen and never had dreamed That the same little Heather – It’s who you saw last weekIn an instant you couldn’t have missed her gleamAs she listened she looked like a distant queen With a difference, there for all to seeShe found a different – A different kind of free”

“Um … that’s the second time you’ve snorted in the last ten minutes. I think that’s got to be some kind of dork record. You do that a lot?”

“Johnny Battistini had gone to Japan once as a replacement drummer for a metal band past its prime ... a one-shot gig that he had talked about for years afterward. At the time, Theo had been frustrated by Johnny’s inability to describe Tokyo and why it had made such an impression on him. Although he spoke about it frequently ... he could never explain his fascination more clearly than: ‘It was just ... weird. It’s like a regular city, but then it’s all different and shit. But to them it’s not different. And that’s the really weird part!”

“They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours. ”