Maybe she was one of those people for whom satisfaction lay only in the future, forever slightly out of reach.

Then she had doubts about the reality of her situation and wondered if her imminent departure was not the illusion of a dream.

It was as though she was an exile from a world that saw things her way

This was new, the consciousness that she might have a future beyond herself.

Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.

She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

She could only realize that she herself — her present self — was in some way different from the other self. That she was seeing with different eyes.

Then when she really thought about it she realized she’d been becoming different people for as long as she could remember but had never really noticed, or had put it down to moods, or marriage, or motherhood. The problem was that she’d thought that at a certain point she would be a finished product.

She seemed to be contemplating a future at once monotonous and insecure with an indifference which was after all a sort of hard-won courage. (chapter 3)

Sometimes she went so far as to wish that she might find herself some day in a difficult position, so that she should have the pleasure of being as heroic as the occasion demanded.

Suddenly she realized that what she was regretting was not the lost past but the lost future, not what had not been but what would never be.

when she looked longer at herself in her new dress, it was she but she living a different life, the life she would have lived if she had stayed in Prague.

Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (...) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.

"The future is there," Cayce hears herself say, "looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now."