Life was nothing other than what came and went with each passing moment.

How time seemed to blur and slow and even stop, how the past and the future vanished until there was nothing but the instant, how fear fled, and thought fled, and even your body.

Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like itself, are made up of moments which pass and become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future.

So we live; a spirit that broods and hovers over the continual death of time, the lost meaning, the unrecaptured moment, the unremembered face, until the final chop that ends all our moments and plunges that spirit back into the void from which it came.

The only constant in a world of tremendous change is the swift passage of time. Five years passed like a blur.

Everything that was to happen had happened and everything that was to be seen had gone. It was now one of those moments when nothing remains but an opening in the sky and a story...

In his mind, the city, as it awoke from its slumber, seemed to be built on quicksand. The stability was illusory.

Temporal provincials were convinced that the present was the only time that mattered, and that anything that had occurred earlier could be safely ignored.

Future and past blurred; what he had already experienced and what he would eventually experience blended so that nothing remained but the moment.

The world was collapsing, and the only thing that really mattered to me was that she was alive.

The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all's that happened and by all that could and will happen next.

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.

Relaxing with the present moment, relaxing with hopelessness, relaxing with death, not resisting the fact that things end, that things pass, that things have no lasting substance, that everything is changing all the time — that is the basic message.

Time went by, swift but interminable. Time past was nothing, no matter how long. Time ahead was everything, no matter how brief.

It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier, seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense