“He was in love, and never had he felt such kindness towards another person.”

“But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I could never remember being lonely, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.”

“Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn't realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

“In the future, he will try to say her name enough, but he never can.”

“If want a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else.”

“For a man to know what he has when he had it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.”

“The Swedish he knew was mostly from Bergman films. He had learned it as a college student, matching the subtitles to the sounds. In Swedish, he could only converse on the darkest of subjects.”