How fast were you?" Wes asked me. I said, "Not that fast." "You mean you couldn't... fly?" he said, smiling at me.

She was just a shell of her former self, functioning and talking but hardly alive.

I always thought I was different.

Just because something's damaged doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated with respect.' 'Ad,' Wallace said, 'it's a coffee table, not an orphan.

So I just decided to relax into it, bumpy and crazy as it might be, and try for once to just go along for the ride.

We'd start slow, the way we always did, because the run, and the game, could go on for a while. Maybe even forever. That was the thing. You just never knew. Forever was so many different things. It was always changing, it was what everything was really all about. It was twenty minutes, or a hundred years, or just this instant, or any instant I wished would last and last. But there was only one truth about forever that really mattered, and that was this: it was happening. Right then, as I ran with Wes into that bright sun, and every moment afterwards. Look, there. Now. Now. Now.

Eventually, it wasn't even your dad I wanted, just anybody. Anybody at all.