“She thought of how precious it was to be able to know another person over many years. There was incomparable richness in it.”

“If I have to watch my precious comrades die with my own eyes, I would not be able to atone for it no matter how many times I died.”

“You ask everybody you know: How long does it usually take to get over it?There are many formulas. One year for every year you dated. Two years for every year you dated. It's just a matter of will power: The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.”

“... I intend to marry Agatha myself. She may be a thousand years old, but she makes an incomparable jam tart, beauty fades, but cooking is eternal.”

“She thought of the hardness and the coldness she had cultivated over those years and wondered if they were the mask she wore or if the mask had become her self. If the longing inside her for kindness, for warmth, for compassion, was the last seed of hope for her, she didn't know how to nurture it or if it could live.”

“How could she be feeling the very same streams that rushed around within him? She thought, as they overflowed and lapped inside her too. She had never felt the inside of another person this way.”