“There was a period when I believed stuff meant something. I thought that if you had matching side chairs and a sofa that harmonized and some beautiful lamps to light them you would have a home, that elegance signaled happiness.”

“Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

“When I was able to get home it first hit me that you had left and I couldn't do anything about it. Every day before that an evening with you was waiting for me after school, now no more, strange feeling. I had grown too accustomed to your warmth. That is also a danger. At home I looked at the notebooks that you had bought and I got the stupidest surge of hope that I'd find something of you, something especially for meant for me. I would so much like to have something of you that I could always keep by me, that nobody else would notice.”

“But when I met you, I saw your light and I loved you at once. And I thought that at this stage in my life, I had nothing to lose by being honest with the woman I wanted to have by my side.”

“I have often sat in that chair behind my desk and wondered how you would look lying naked here on this sofa. It was a form of self-inflicted torture." “Good heavens”

“I have nothing to offer you' said Hactar faintly, 'but tricks of the light. It is possible to be comfortable with tricks of the light, though, if that is all you have.'His voice evanesced, and in the dark a long, velvet paisley-covered sofa coalesced into hazy shape.... At least, if it wasn't real, it did support them, and as that is what sofas are supposed to do, this, by any test that mattered, was a real sofa.”