82
" The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers. "
― Ray Bradbury , Farewell Summer (Green Town, #3)
84
" The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence. "
― P.D. James , The Private Patient (Adam Dalgliesh, #14)
86
" I can't go to Amsterdam. One of my doctors thinks it's a bad idea." He was quiet for a second. " God," he said. " I should've just paid for it myself. Should've just taken you straight from the Funky Bones to Amsterdam." " But then I would've had a probably fatal episode of deoxygenation in Amsterdam, and my body would have been shipped home in the cargo hold of an airplane," I said. " Well, yeah," he said. " But before that, my grand romantic gesture would have totally gotten me laid." I laughed pretty hard, hard enought that I felt where the chest tube had been. " You laugh because it's true," he said.I laughed again." It's true, isn't it!" " Probably not," I said, and then after a moment added, " although you never know. "
