Jennifer Egan said this quote

It was the hat. He looked sweet in the hat. How could a man in a fuzzy blue hat have used human bones to pave his roads?

~ Jennifer Egan

When the clock stops on a life, all things emanating from it become precious, finite, and cordoned off for preservation. Each aspect of the dead person is removed from the flux of the everyday, which, of course, is where we miss him most. The quarantine around death makes it feel unlucky and wrong--a freakish incursion--and the dead, thus quarantined, come to seem more dead than they already are.... Borrowing from the dead is a way of keeping them engaged in life's daily transactions--in other words, alive.

~ Jennifer Egan

That's what death is, Danny thought: wanting to talk to someone and not being able to.

~ Jennifer Egan

So this is it ⎯ what cost me all that time. A man who turned out to be old, a house that turned out to be empty.

~ Jennifer Egan