“There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn't work the way you or most other people thought it did.”

“People said things they didn't mean all the time. Everybody else in the world seemed able to factor it in. But not Lena. Why did she believe the things people said? Why did she cling to them so literally? Why did she think she knew people when she clearly didn't? Why did she imagine that the world didn't change, when it did? Maybe she didn't change. She believed what people said and she stayed the same." (Lena, 211)”

“Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.”

“She discarded whole chunks of life that obsessed other people. She didn't torture people she loved, nor did she hunger for them. She kept it simple.”

“The most haunting thing was not that he didn't love her anymore. She could have accepted that eventually. The most haunting thing was that he did. He loved her from afar. He loved her in a way that was preserved in time, that couldn't be sullied. And she tended it in her careful, curatorial way.”

“Marnie hated to see her spend so much of herself on someone who didn't care.”

“Part of the danger of living so long, knowing you were going to come back and back again, was putting off your life until you never lived it at all. Just so it was possible. Just so long as you could, you never actually did. Just so you didn't ruin it.”