[M]ay the Sea of Life stretch before you like glass, and may you always have the wind at your backs.
Gomez’s wedding toast, p. 278
Henry: I would hold it close to my face, so close I couldn’t see anything but that blue. It would fill me with a feeling, a feeling I later tried to duplicate with alcohol and finally found again with Clare, a feeling of unity, oblivion, mindlessness in the best sense of the word.
(22)
I sat on the back porch in my pajamas with Mom and Dad and Mrs. and Mr. Kim, drinking lemonade and watching the blueness of the evening sky.
(25)
The streetlights tint the sky orange above me; it’s a deep cerulean blue over the lake.
(117)
things happen the way they happened, once and only once. I’m not a proponent of splitting universes.(46; ch. 3)
a self from 1992 […] said that he thinks there is only free will when you are in time, in the present. He says in the past we can only do what we did, and we can only be there if we were there.(57; ch. 4)
everything has already happened.(57)
The choices we’re working with here are a block universe, where past, present and future all coexist simultaneously and everything has already happened; chaos, where anything can happen and nothing can be predicted because we can’t know all the variables; and a Christian universe in which God made everything and it’s all here for a purpose but we have free will anyway.(76; ch. 4)
My mother dying … it’s the pivotal thing … everything else goes around and around it … I dream about it, and I also – time travel to it. Over and over.(114; ch. 6)
There’s something wrong with me. I get dislocated in time, for no reason. I can’t control it, I never know when it’s going to happen, or where and when I’ll end up.(143; ch. 8)
Causation only runs forward. Things happen once, only once. If you know things … I feel trapped, most of the time. If you are in time, not knowing … you’re free. Trust me.(145; ch. 8)
It’s a brain thing […] things like running, and sex, and meditation tend to help me stay put in the present.(166; ch. 9)
So far, my range is about fifty years in each direction. But I very rarely go to the future, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen much of anything there that I found useful. It’s the past that exerts a lot of pull. In the past I feel much more solid. Maybe the future itself is less substantial?(167; ch. 9)
sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know?(75; ch. 4)
I can see everything laid out, like a map, past and future, everything at once, like an angel. […] It’s happened already. All at once. […] I’ve seen my future; I can’t change it, and I wouldn’t if I could.(149; ch. 8)
nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost, or dead, or far away, right now we are here, and nothing can mar our perfection, or steal the joy of this perfect moment.(241; ch. 11)
He is back in the present, my younger Henry, the one who belongs here.(276; ch. 14)
I roll over and look at him and realize that his mouth is bleeding profusely. I jump up to get a washcloth and Henry is still smiling when I get back and start daubing at his lip.(42; ch. 3)
One of the best and most painful things about time traveling has been the opportunity to see my mother alive.(109; ch. 6)
I wish for a moment that Time would lift me out of this day [Christmas Eve], and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us.(118; ch. 7)