When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws.

My house fly theory is related to my theory about why time seems to go faster as you get older." "Why's that?" the girl asked. "It's proportional," Leonard explained. "When you're five, you've only been alive a couple thousand days. But by the time you're fifty, you've lived around twenty thousand days. So a day when you're five seems longer because it's a greater percentage of the whole.

that since Cecilia’s suicide, the Lisbon’s could hardly wait for the night to forget themselves in sleep

He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up.

College wasn't like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.