“Even the few days I spend reminiscing in Mexico City seem like memories or dreams. Everything looks different and backward without [him] and his uncertainties. I could have even stayed at the same hotels, in the same rooms even, yet would have never known the difference. Traffic and weather seem painted onto this dull grey canvas of highway, detached from any near past. Nietzsche calls it the separation of body and soul - the improbability of two separate worlds. I was incapable of fitting in anywhere. I was in search of expiation. I would never find it - it had never been there.”

“Not his real name, darling, but my own name for him. I never thought it could be like this. I never thought one could be so close, and yet so different to a single human being. He is everything I've never been, and yet I love him more than any person or anything I've ever known.”

“I have never yet known what it was to separate esteem from love”

“I’d laughed this high-pitched, witchy laugh, and looked right at him. Mostly, I remember feeling vital and untouchable, like I was free and separate from him. I would never be him, and because of that, I would never be lonely or laughed at, and I would never have to worry about anything.”

“I wondered whether the loss of one's sight would deprive a person also of the memory of everything that he had seen before. If so, the man would no longer be able to see even in his dreams. if not, if only the eyeless could still see through their memory, it would not be too bad. The world seemed to be pretty much the same everywhere, and even though people differed from one another, just as animals and trees did, one should know fairly well what they looked like after seeing them for years. I had lived only seven years, but I remembered a lot of things. when I closed my eyes, many details cam back still more vividly. who knows, perhaps without his eyes the plowboy would start seeing an entirely new, more fascinating world.”

“I loved him so, even his past was precious to me. I found myself kissing each mark, thinking, I would have had it never happen, I would wish it away, taking him further and further back to a time when he had known no disappointments, no battles, no wounds, as I erased each one. To make him again like Caesarion. Yet if we take the past away from those we love - even to protect them - do we not steal their very selves?”