Quotes from Thomas Christopher Greene

time can be slowed if you live deliberately. If you stop and watch sunsets. If you spend time sitting on porches listening to the woods. If you give in to the reality of the seasons.

I used to think that all marriages ran the same trajectory. They start with wanting to climb inside the other person and wear her skin as your own. They end with thinking that if the person across from you says another word, you will put a fork in her neck.

And she thinks perhaps that is what love is: letting someone else see that part of you that shatters like glass...They will grow old together, broken together, and as long as they both don't completely shatter at the same time, they might find a way to pick each other off the ground.

She considers the past. She measures it and weighs it and holds it in her hand like a plum. The past is everything now, and she understands that this is what it means to be dying: You stop looking forward, instead living for moments that happened years before.

Make sure your children live longer than you do. Do that and you've really done something, okay? The rest is filler

Margot knows by looking at him that she will have to lead. It is not something that she is used to, and if someone had asked her before this evening if the idea even interested her, she would have said no. But Henry's words suggest fragility, and she thinks maybe this extends to who he is, but she can also sense his strength, hidden somewhere like a secret, and this is the part she wants to know.

What? She won't graduate because she can't swim the length of a pool? Really? Is this a serious academic position for a serious academic place?

And this is the part of love no one tells you about: that you can be far apart and if you close your eyes and push you face into the pillow, you can reach across time and space and for a few moments before you fall asleep you can be together for as long as you like.

For this is the great paradox of life, isn't it? The more you love someone, the more that person will eventually break your heart.

And this is his gift, the gift of listening and it reminds Margot of how plenty of people know how to talk but precious few are good at listening.

It is his raw ambition that draws her in, the impracticality of it all, this idea that he wants to do great things with words, that he wants to chase some kind of ancient fame, perhaps even become one of the people they read about in books.

Oh, he was a decent-enough high school student, good grades and well-liked, but his test scores were nothing to write home about. He might as well have Christmas-treed the math test.