“We knew nothing of loss. Nobody has taught us about pain. Until that moment, death had just amounted to a scary sound.”

“Nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.”

“...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.”

“I regret the way pain has taught me nothing.”

“Nobody has the right to remove any single experience from another. Life and death are promised. We have a right to pain.”

“Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.”