“In that moment, the machinery of the world lined up. Somewhere a clock struck midnight, and Hugo's future seemed to fall perfectly into place.”

“The clock of doom had struck as fated;
the poet, without a sound,
let fall his pistol on the ground.”

“Falling into Place:
deciding everything is falling into place perfectly as long as you don't get too picky about what you mean by place. Or perfectly.”

“Somewhere along the line we seem to have confused comfort with happiness.”

“Midnight, when the monotonous tick-tock of diurnal progress is for one throbbing moment replaced by the cool but smokey honk of a saxophone, alternately seductive and threatening. Midnight. The black growth on the clock face that has to be biopsied every twenty-four hours to see whether it is malignant or benign.”

“Somewhere in between
The waxing and the waning wave
Somewhere in between
What the song and the silence says
Somewhere in between
The ticking and the tocking clock
Somewhere in a dream between
Sleep and waking up
Somewhere in between
Breathing out and breathing in
Like twilight is neither night nor morning”

“This is a James Taylor moment and we are stuck with a piano player who wants to sound like Enya and a southern funk band that, somewhere along the line, fell into thinking Alabama is a sweet place to call home.”

“Even if all the clocks in the station break down, thought Hugo, time won't stop. Not even if you really want it to.

Like now.”

“The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

“A man who worships in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church lives, psychologically, in a burning and continuous moment that never ends: the present is ever-lasting; the past is telescoped into the now; there is no future and at any moment Christ may come again and then the anxious tension of time will be no more…. [My grandmother] lived with all of us, yet, psychologically, she hovered somewhere off in space…. Always she seemed to be peeping out of Heaven into the world while living in the world.”