"The idea that a well-defined now exists throughout the universe is an illusion, an illegitimate extrapolation of our own experience."

"We are stories, contained within the twenty complicated centimeters behind our eyes, lines drawn by traces left by the (re)mingling together of things in the world, and oriented toward the direction of increasing entropy, in a rather particular corner of this inmense, chaotic universe."

"Books contain our history; our brains swarm with memories."

"Children grow up and discover that the world is not as it seemed from within the four walls of their homes. Humankind as a whole does the same."

"Time is information we don't have. Time is our ignorance."

"We are for ourselves in large measure what we see and have seen of ourselves refelcted back to us by our friends, our loves, and our enemies."

"We can go back to serenely immersing ourselves in time -in our finite time- to savoring the clear intensity of every fleeting and cherished moment of the brief circle of our existence."

"Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution."

"This is time for us. Memory. A nostalgia. The pain of absence. But it isn't absence that causes sorrow. It is affection and love. Without affection, without love, such absences would cause us no pain. For this reason, even the pain caused by absence is in the end something good and even beautiful. Because it feeds on that which gives meaning to life."

"Before Newton, time for humanity was the way of counting how things changed. Before him, no one had thought it possible that a time independent of things could exist. Don't take your intuitions and ideas to be 'natural': they are often the products of the ideas of audacious thinkers who came before us."