“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.”

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

“There were many things they simply didn't talk about: between them, silence was not so much a form of evasion as a way for solitary people to exist in a family.”

“Only solitary men know the full joys of friendship. Others have their family; but to a solitary and an exile his friends are everything.”

“How could two people who were so in love not end up happily ever after? It had to work. Didn’t it?”

“How could they say that they truly loved each other? They had simply grown up together, been children together, and the proximity of it, the closeness of it, had produced in them love s illusion. And yet--on the other hand--what was love if it wasn't this instinct she felt...”