And she learned that you couldn’t stockpile anything that mattered, really. Feelings, people, songs, sex, fireworks: they existed only in time, and when it was over, so were they.

But porca miseria, the things night can do to time. In place of hardwired sequence, it's more like everything all mixed up.

But what if time worked the other way around?What if what his adolescent self had felt then was the ghost of his present one, sitting here on a sagging bench, beckoning him into his future?

But no, what interested him, psychologically speaking, was the sense of continuity itself, the mind's insistence that this was the same Regan he'd known when he was eight; had anything befallen her, the Regan he lost would have been the one who'd perched on the black rocks of the park back then, with all her futures inside.

There is no such thing as a perfect phrase, or a private language, and . . . time only runs the one way.

And didn't time always slow, anyway, the closer you came to what you wanted?