When somebody is that patient, you have to feel grateful, and then you want to hurt them. Does that make any sense?

He had never realized, while Elspeth was alive, the extent to which a thing had not completely happened until he told her about it.

He would say her name over and over until it devolved into meaningless sounds - mah REI kuh, mah REI kuh - it became an entry in a dictionary of loneliness.

I sleep all day. Noises flit around the house- garbage truck in the alley, rain, tree rapping against the bedroom window. I sleep. I inhabit sleep firmly, willing it, wielding it, pushing away dreams, refusing, refusing. Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion. [...] It is afternoon, it is night, it is morning. Everything is reduced to this bed, this endless slumber that makes the days into one day, makes time stop, stretches and compacts time until it is meaningless.

…she smiles in an exhausted but warm sort of way, as though she is a brilliant sun in some other galaxy

It's hard being left behind. (...) It's hard to be the one who stays.

one of the best and the most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.