“He sees the labor by which a farmer exchanges his allocation of time in this world for an allocation of time in this world. Here, in the heady bouquet of nature’s pantry, your father sniffs mortality.”

“It does not occur to you, young as you are, that it is she who needs reassurance, that she seeks you out not to comfort you, but rather for the comfort that you, her only recently recovered little brother, have in this moment of fragile vulnerability the capacity to offer her.”

“But whereas achieving a massive bank balance demonstrably attractcs fine physical specimens desperate to give their love in exchange, acheiving love tends to do the opposite. It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success.”

“You wonder whether, should anything go wrong, you will see your death depicted in the micro-battlefield on-screen before your brain ceases to function, or whether the internal chain of events will outpace the external relay, leaving you with simple blackness, despite everything this spaceship of an operating theater has to offer.”

“Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

And then the entire last page is absolutely beautiful and I can hardly help myself from shedding at least one tear in reading it.