“At some point during the summer of 1944 she started wearing two plaits instead of one, and sometimes wore her hair loose. It was … indescribable. That hair, a dark firefall, a molten mass, I would have given everything—everything!—to run my fingers through it, to have a taste of the girl, nothing else was important, you could have shown me thousands of similar creatures or even brought them to me, she was the one I wanted, no one else, only her, and wholly, entirely, with everything.And yet: my love could have lighted on any girl, on any one of all the pretty girls this side of death.”

“I hummed love songs, silent love songs the words of which I’ve forgotten, sang to myself for nights on end, never tiring of praising my love in song, it was just as it ought to be and I dreamed the whole of Germany had exploded and just we two were lying, buried alive, somewhere in the last warmth of ashes, the air was used up and I gave her my last breath in one long kiss—that kind of stuff, I take nothing of it back, it was right and it was marvelous.”

“Thanatos, der alles wusste, stieg in Erwartung des Kommenden die Niederenslinger Hügel hinauf zum Plateau, suchte einen Baumstrunk, setzte sich und wartete. Er trug einen schwarzen Aktenkoffer bei sich, der alle Geduld der Welt enthielt.”

“Er verhehlte auch nie sein Desinteresse an etwas, gehörte zu denen, deren Nähe man nicht sucht, deren Fremdheit zugleich dauerirritiert.”

“If one could have any girl one wanted at the drop of a hat, would one want one?”

“And there she was, alone and walking out in the cornfield while everyone else I cared for sat together in one room. She would always feel me and think of me. I could see that, but there was no longer anything I could do. Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose tot ell it, even to one person at a time.”

“Let me explain it to you then. I just had a beautiful girl trust me enough to touch her and see her in a way no one else ever has. I got to hold her and watch her and feel her as she came apart in my arms. It was like nothing else I'd ever experienced. She was breathtaking and she was responding to me. She wanted me. I was the one making her spiral out of control.”