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It has never been easy for me to understand the obliteration of time, to accept, as others seem to do, the swelling and corresponding shrinkage of seasons or the conscious acceptance that one year has ended and another has begun. There is something here that speaks of our essentials helplessness and how the greater substance of our lives in bound up with waste and opacity. Even the sentence parts seize on the tongue, so that to say “Twelve years passed” is to deny the fact of biographical logic. How can so much time hold so little, how can it be taken from us?
The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields
