“we wish you everything you wish yourself' Jurgen said.'What do you wish yourself?' Birgit asked.I felt silly 'I don't really have any specific wishes''a new old man perhaps?' Juliet said playfully'but please, not just any old man!' I said.'of course not just any old man! The man with whom it'll all be different.”

“We don't have anything in common. We just complement each other. You don't have to do everything together; you need some distance between you. But there's no ideal distance and there are only two possibilities: either you reduce the distance or you enlarge it. And because we want to reduce the distance, we're going to get married. Some time or another.”

“For everything I wished were different about the old man, I found comfort in just as many things that never changed.”

“Maybe she'd ended up going to Ireland because whilst visiting her father she'd bumped into an old love from her youth, perhaps even her ex? Such spontaneous acts really only worked with men left over from earlier in your life.”

“I don't want a new man.""I'll be dead someday," my mother said. "And then what? You'll wish you had someone.""I have a hamster.”

“I think it's better if you rely on the fact you belong together, instead of having to reinvent your togetherness every day. People who say right off the bat that they don't want to take risks because their relationship is going to dissolve anyway - well, you might just as well split up right away. Why wait?”

“Every man desires to live long, but no man wishes to be old.”