What strange creatures other human beings are, he thought. It’s amazing anyone ever connects.

The secret to life is ice cream.

You Only Live Once. That’s what people said, as if life really mattered because it happened only one time. But what if it was the other way around? What if what you did mattered MORE because life happened again and again, consequences unfolding across centuries and contents? What if you had chances upon chances to love the people you loved, to fix what you screwed up, to get it right?

He was almost six, that tender age when the baby plumpness starts to melt away from children’s bodies and you can see, in their newly angular faces, the people they might become.

Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?

The world was more dangerous than it had been a few weeks ago. It was a world that slipped and slid beneath you, where children died because mothers forgot to check the latch. How did you keep your child safe in that kind of world?

Her mom... had always been there, her love as basic and necessary as gravity, until one day she wasn’t.

How could your whole life end so quickly? One moment it was there before you – not perfect but yours – and the next it was gone.

No matter how careful you planned or did your research, the unknowable things would rise up out of the deep and overturn everything. But that was what had drawn him in, wasn’t it? The depths of what we don’t know?

He thought of Heraclitus: a man cannot step in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.