“It is said that the future narrows once we cease to believe it is eternal...”

“I can no longer pretend that I believe in God. It's highly possible that I lost this belief when I started having sexual relationships.”

“The distance we set between ourselves and the events of our past life, which reduces their scale, the backlog of things we failed to notice at the time, the logic which connects them, which back then was invisible, the light shed on them by the epoch they belong to, which mankind already considers a moribund piece of history, their ultimate strangeness, which makes us look back on the person we were as though they were a different being, all these things conspire to turn our past into a dream.”

“Mais les larmes sont celles d'une joie désespérée. Tout a été largué, mais ce tout n'a été que ça : le corps que j'ai livré n'était qu'un souffle d'air et celui que j'ai embrassé se trouve déjà à des années-lumière. Comment, dans un tel dénuement, ne pas exprimer sa détresse ?”

“We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty.”

“It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.”

“Then he would get into a plane and leave the field wide open; the field was crammed with paralegals, all of them stoutly armed with condoms.”