Félix J. Palma, The Map of Time

"Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore."

"For the very first time Andrew realized that life, real life, had no connection with the way people spent their days, whose lips they kissed, what medals were pinned on them, or the shoes they mended. Life, real life went on soundlessly...ultimately there was no difference between Queen Victoria and the most wretched beggar in London: both were complex machines made up of bone, organ, and tissue, whose fuel was the breath of God."

"Before cruelly vilifying them from a great height, the mudslingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavors were by and large a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavor, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning."

"...but there are stories that cannot begin at their beginning, and perhaps this is one of them."

"And so everything depends on you, Bertie. Bishop or rook. Your life or mine. Do what you believe you have to do."

"Because between doing something and doing nothing, this is all I can do."

"Perhaps you would have preferred it if I had not written you any letter. Perhaps you would have liked it better if I had let you meet your fate unprepared. After all, what awaits you is not all that bad and even contains moments of happiness, as you have seen. But if I wrote to you, it is because somehow I feel this is not the life you should live. Indeed, perhaps you should stay in the past, living happily with Jane and turning me into a successful writer who knows nothing about journeys through time, not real ones anyway. For me it is too late, of course, I cannot choose a different life, but you can. You can still choose between your life and the life I have just recounted to you, between going on being Bertie or becoming me. In the end, that is what time travel gives us, a second chance, the opportunity to go back and do things differently."

"Merrick belonged to that class of reader who was able to forget with amazing ease the hand moving the characters behind the scenes of the novel."

"And hearing her breathe softly by his side, Wells understood that, as so often happened, his wife knew what he wanted so much better than he did, and that if only he had asked her, he could have saved all that time he taken coming to a decision which, in addition, now proved to be the wrong one. Yes, he told himself, sometimes the best way to find out what we want is to choose what we do not want."

"...the wrath of God pales beside that of man."

"Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?"

"Yes, he would look for her, whether to delight in the joys of spring together or to plunge into the abyss. He would look for her because he loved her. And somehow this would lessen the lie Claire was living. For, in the end, the girl's love was reciprocated, and Tom's love, like Shackleton's, was also unattainable, lost in the ether, unable to its way to her."

"[A] writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition, and regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit an author’s nose for things, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded, absurdly cautious approach to his work, which would end up stifling his latent genius."

"There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood."