“One minute she was just this woman I worked with, the next, she was this woman I couldn't go an hour without seeing.”

“It seemed as if I could see things in her that others couldn't see, qualities which not even she was aware of. It was as I I could already see in her the woman she would later become.”

“When she was in Djibouti and I was in Aden, and I used to go and see her for twenty-four hours, she managed to multiply the misunderstandings between us until there were exactly sixty minutes before I had to leave; sixty minutes, just long enough to make you feel the seconds passing one by one.”

“One woman, called Eva, used to visit my mother and sometimes we would call in next door to visit her. Sometimes Frau Eva gave me cakes and fruit drinks. I remember she was very kind. It was not until many years later that I understood just who she was. To me, at the time, she was just a very nice woman who lived next door sometimes, although she did tend to go away, and was often not seen for several months.”

“She looked like the kind of woman I could fall in love with. Trouble is, she was standing next to the kind of woman I’d like to make love to. 
”

“There was a pretty young woman I used to see pegging out sheets and I worried that she would grow old there and that no one would know how beautiful she was. And maybe she would die without ever having really lived.”