juno ꩜’s Reviews > A Tale for the Time Being > Status Update

"Dressed in her pajamas, she sat in front of the glowing screen in the dark, dimly aware of the sounds of breathing in and out of sync, her father's breath the louder, steady, despite his professed desire for its cessation..."

"When she was little, she was always surprised to pick up a book in the morning, and open it, and find the letters aligned neatly in their places.

Somehow she expected them to be all jumbled up, having fallen to the bottom when the covers were shut."

"He described it as a collaboration with time and place, whose outcome neither he nor any of his contemporaries would ever live to witness, but he was okay with not knowing.

Patience was part of his nature, and he accepted his lot as a short-lived mammal, scurrying in and out amid the roots of the giants."

"...and my dad really wants me to be safe, which makes him sound like a pretty typical dad, which he would be if he had a job and didn't keep trying to kill himself all the time.

Sometimes I wonder if he wants me to be safe so he'll feel less guilty when he finally succeeds."

"But to her surprise, although the color of the ink occasionally bled from purple to pink to black to blue and back to purple again, the writing itself never faltered, growing smaller and if any thing even denser, straight through to the very last, tightly packed page.

The girl had run out of paper before she ran out of words."

"Time itself is being, he wrote, and all being is time... In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate."

"I don't mind thinking of the world without me because I'm unexceptional. but I hate the idea of the world without old Jiko. She's totally unique and spe-cial, like the last Galapagos tortoise or some other ancient animal hobbling around on the scorched earth, who is the only one left of its kind."

"Ruth looked more closely at the letters. They were round and a little bit sloppy (as she now imagined the girl must be, too), but they stood more or less upright and marched gamely across the page at a good clip, not in a hurry, but not dawdling, either. Sometimes at the end of a line, they crowded cach other a little, like people jostling to get onto an elevator or into a subway car, just as the doors were closing"