“My sounds [crying] were small and muffled but obvious. No one paid any attention. It was the way we had become. In a world full of sorrows, this was only one more.”

“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”

“My ears were full. Nothing more, not one more sound, could push into them and be registered.”

“It is we ourselves that we have to think about, no one else. That is the way the saints worked. They paid attention to what they were doing, and if others were attracted to them by their enterprise, why, well and good. But they looked to themselves first of all.”

“How was it that Adrian Ivashkov, who never seemed to take anything seriously was the only one among these "responsible" people who paid attention to such small details? How was he the only one to really understand the magnitude of what I was feeling?”

“If we had paid attention, we would have understood there are some things in this world you cannot outrun.”