Time was a thief, he stole your life away from you and the only way you could get it back was to outwit him and snatch it right back. - Kate Atkinson

She had had affairs over the years ... but she had never been pregnant, never been a mother or a wife and it was only when she realized that it was too late, that it could never be, that she understood what it was that she had lost. Pamela's life would go on after she was dead, her descendants spreading through the world like the waters of a delta, but when Ursula died she would simply end. A stream that ran dry.

Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn’t even a shape left in the world where you’d been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

The purpose of Art,” his mother, Sylvie, said — instructed even — “is to convey the truth of a thing, not to be the truth itself.