"If he has a last thought, if there is time for a last thought, it will simply be, So this is what a last thought is like."

"It occurs to me that we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways."

"This is what it leads to! This is what it leads to if you let your attention wander for a moment!"

"Truth is not spoken in anger.Truth is spoken, if it ever comes to be spoken, in love."

"...we are on the road from no A to no B in the world..."

"The mistake the two of us made,’ I said, ‘was that we skimped the foreplay. I’m not blaming you, it was as much my fault as yours, but it was a fault nonetheless."

"From one seed a whole handful: that was what it meant to say the bounty of the earth."

"For, seen from the outside, from a being who is alien to it, reason is simply a vast tautology."

"What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?"

"All of which makes up a story I do not choose to tell. I choose not to tell it because to no one, not even to you, do I own proof that I am a substantial being with a substantial history in the world."

"... but what do slow and fast matter any more?"

"I have never seen anything like it: two little discs of glass suspended in front of his eyes in loops of wire. Is he blind?"

"He tends to trust pictures more than he trusts words. Not because pictures cannot lie but because, once they leave the darkroom, they are fixed, immutable."

"Jokes, secrets, complicities; a glance here, a word there: that is their way of being together, of being apart."

"Je mehr sich die Dinge ndern, desto mehr bleibt alles beim alten."

"Fate deals you a hand, and you play the hand you are dealt. You do not whine, you do not complain. That, he used to believe, was his philosophy. Why then can he not resist these plunges into darkness?"

"Is this love - this easy generosity, this sense of being understood at last, of not having to pretend?"

"All that I want now is to live out my life in ease in a familiar world, to die in my own bed and be followed to the grave by old friends."

"What I did not know was how longing could store itself away in the hollows of one's bones and then one day without warning flood out."

"How many people are there left who are neither locked up nor standing guard at the gate?"

"How easy it is to love a child, how hard to love what a child turns into!"

"Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger."

"Also the air: the air is full of sighs and cries. These are never lost: if you listen carefully, with a sympathetic ear, you can hear them echoing forever within the second sphere."

"He believed that our life-stories are ours to construct as we wish,within or even against the constraints posed by the real world..."

"Todo amor, al final es moderado"

"Do you think what happened here was an exam: if you come through, you get a diploma and safe conduct into the future, or a sign to paint on the door-lintel that will make the plague pass you by?"