Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something. He kept thinking about one word - forever - and felt the burning ache just beneath his rib cage.

The snow may be falling in the winter of my discontent, but at least I've got sarcastic company.

The Z’s will kill us all, and then the Z’s will die out and in sixty years there will be no one to remember our silly war, Caroline’s wasted ammunition, my year of zombic survivalism, Rene DesCartes’s musings, or Michelangelo’s sculptures. And that is really only the sadness here as I drink a thousand-dollar bottle of wine down here in the cellar: We did a few things worth remembering, and I wish for someone to remember them.

For she had embodied the Great Perhaps--she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

I’ll give you my strength if I can have your remission.

So we gave up. I'd finally had enough of chasing after a ghost who did not want to be seen. We'd failed, maybe, but some mysteries aren't meant to be solved.