“The rest-the vast majority, tens of thousands of days-are unremarkable, repetitive, even monotonous. We glide through them then instantly forget them. We tend not to think about this arithmetic when we look back on our lives. We remember the handful of Big Days and throw away the rest.We organize our long, shapeless lives into tidy little stories...But our lives are mostly made up of junk, of ordinary, forgettable days, and 'The End' is never the end.”

“We move through time like a man in a rowboat, looking back even as we move forward.”

“My childhood ended that summer. I learned the word murder. But it is not enough to be told a word as big as that...You have to live with it, carry it around with you. You have to...see it from different angles, at different times of day, in different light, until you understand, until it enters you.”

“At some point as adults we cease to be our parents' children and we become our children's parents instead.”

“Do we spend most of our days trying to remember or to forget? Do we spend most of our time running towards or away from our lives?”

“It was a limitation of human consciousness: We live only in the future and past, we cannot perceive now. Now occupies no space, a hypothetical gap between future and past. Only an exceptional few could feel now athletes and jazzmen and, yes, thieves...”

“Today is a most unusual day, because we have never lived it before; we will never live it again; it is the only day we have.”