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41 " I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things. "
― Karen Thompson Walker , The Age of Miracles
42 " They say that humans can read each other in a hundred subtle ways, that we can detect messages in the subtlest movements of a body, in the briefest expressions of a face, but somehow, on that day, I had communicated with amazing efficiency the exact opposite of what I most wanted in the world. "
43 " A man should enjoy things if he can; he should spend his final days in the sun. Mine will be spent by a reading lamp. "
44 " After the slowing, every action required a little more force than it used to. The physics had changed. Take, for example, the slightly increased drag of a hand on a knife or a finger on a trigger. From then on, we all had a little more time to decide what not to do. And who knows how fast a second-guess can travel? Who has ever measured the exact speed of a regret? But the new gravity was not enough to overcome the pull of certain other forces, more powerful, less known--no law of physics can account for desire. "
45 " My grandfather liked any story in which the unlikely turned out to be true. "
46 " I kept quiet, but the knowledge gathered like a storm. I could see the future: My father wasn't coming back. And this one fact seemed to point to other facts and others still: Love frays and humans fail, time passes, eras end. "
47 " Months later, Michaela's mother would spread a star chart before us and explain to me that the slowing had shifted everyone's astrological signs. Fortunes had changed. Personalities had rearranged. The unlucky had turned lucky. The lucky had turned less so. Our fates, so long ago written in the stars, had been rewritten in a day. "
48 " Art thrives in times of uncertainty. "
49 " With a little persuasion, any familiar thing can turn abnormal in the mind. Here’s a thought experiment. Consider this brutal bit of magic: A human grows a second human in a space inside her belly; she grows a second heart and a second brain, second eyes and second limbs, a complete set of second body parts as if for use as spares, and then, after almost a year, she expels that second screaming being out of her belly and into the world, alive. Bizarre, isn’t it? "
50 " I never knew until then that snow made everything quiet, somehow silencing all the world's noise. "
51 " So much that seems harmless in daylight turns imposing in the dark. What else, you had to wonder, was only a trick of light? "
52 " But I guess it never is what you worry over that comes to pass in the end. The real catastrophes are always different - unimagined, unprepared for, unknown. "
53 " Ours was a sudden bond, the kind possible only for the young or the imperiled. "
54 " I like to think about how my parents' lives once shimmered in front of them, half hidden, like buried gold. Back then the future was whatever they imagined-- and they never imagined this.But doesn't every previous era feel like fiction once it's gone? "
55 " For days afterward, a series of magical thoughts flew through my mind. For instance, it seemed somehow surprising that the hours continued to pass in spite of what I knew. It was almost shocking that time did not, in fact, stop. "
56 " I knew everything about the back of that head - the swirl of his hair, the curve of his ear, the straight, sharp line of his jaw. I liked the way he smelled like soap even late in the afternoon. "
57 " Maybe it had begun to happen before the slowing, but it was only afterward that I realized it: My friendships were disintegrating. Things were coming apart. It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived. "
58 " Of all the strange phenomena that befell us that year, maybe nothing surprised me more than the sound of that small question rolling out of Seth Moreno's mouth: "Want to come? "
59 " A veces las historias más tristes son las que menos palabras requieren: no volví a saber nada de Seth Moreno. "
60 " What I understood so far about this life was there were the bullies and the bullied, the hunters and the hunted, the strong and the stronger and the weak "