Suppose we could bring them back, make them visible, to occupy the city side by side with the living, dressed as they would have dressed, alive as ever, so that time itself ceased to exist, and past and present mingled freely. Imagine if we could rejoin one another.
-- Unnamed Older Man (chapter 1)

Importance: As they walk towards the river, Dominic and the unnamed older man discuss the ghosts that inevitably populate Manhattan. The older man encourages Dominic to consider a reality in which these ghosts exist alongside the living. This notion helps to introduce Lewis’ central concern with the fraudulence of linear time. Ghosts, as interruptions of the past into the present, expose the way in which the character of New York depends not only on the lives and stories of its current residents, but on those that are long since gone.

The two of them, their skin so soft, their hair so full, their...
-- Narrator (chapter 4)