Jennifer Egan

“Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time.”

“That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.”

“Time’s a goon, right? You gonna let that goon push you around?” Scotty shook his head. “The goon won.”

“When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.”

“I don't know what happened to me," he said, shaking his head. "I honestly don't." ...”

“Time's a goon right? Isn't that the expression?”

“I write with pen and paper, my first draft, on legal pads.”