“She knows how things fit together and move, but so few people understand her. She’s the most solitary person I’ve ever known.”

“She’s really not my kind of girl — most of them have tattoos or nose rings — but there’s something about her smile. She smiles like she’s in love with whoever she’s looking at. She smiled at me a few months ago. I’ve been trying to get her to do it again ever since.”

“What solitary people my family were! It amazed me that two of its members had ever gotten together to produce the others. But then solitary people pretending not to be – that must be how families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous.”

“One of the the things she most liked about the city -apart from all its obvious attractions, the theatre, the galleries, the exhilarating walks by the river- was that so few people ever asked you personal questions.”

“No doubt very few people understand the purely subjective nature of the phenomenon that we call love, or how it creates, so to speak, a supplementary person, distinct from the person whom the world knows by the same name, a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves.”

“Now and then I see something in her eyes, and I wonder if I’ve ever grasped how much pain she’s really in.”