“She looked fresh and young and very beautiful. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful. ‘Hello,’ I said. When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me”

“When I saw her I was in love with her. Everything turned over inside of me. She looked toward the door, saw there was no one, then she sat on the side of the bed and leaned over and kissed me.”

“As I looked and looked, the living face became visible in the dead, the young in the old. This is what must happen to old married couples, I thought: the young man is preserved in the old one for her, the beauty and grace of the young woman stay fresh in the old one for him.”

“I am going to die of love....daroga....I am dying of love .... That's how it is... I loved her so! And I love her still...daroga.....and I am dying of love for her, I tell you! if you knew how beautiful she was when she let me kiss her...It was the first ...time, daroga, the first time I ever kissed a woman.. Yes, alive... I kissed her alive.... And she looked as beautiful as if she had been dead!”

“He closed the damn door and turned and stopped, looking at her. “Sometimes,” he said softly, and stopped, then started again, “I often wonder why human men are so fixated on how a woman looks when there’s so much more to explore, and so many kinds of beauty—why obsess over one particular version? But sometimes, when I look at you, I understand."And sometimes, when he looked at her the way he was now, she was beautiful. Not just okay. Not even really pretty. Beautiful.”

“She repeated what her mother had told me, that she had been moved when she heard me playing as she passed the house. She had seen me on the street a few times, too, and begun to worship me. She actually used that word: worship. It made me turn bright red. I mean, to be 'worshiped' by such a beautiful little doll of a girl! I don't think it was an absolute lie, though. I was in my thirties already, of course, and I could never be as beautiful and bright as she was, and I had no special talent, but I must have had something that drew her to me, something that was missing in her, I would guess. Which must have been what got her interested in my to begin with. I believe that now, looking back. And I'm not boasting.”