“Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.”

“There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.”

“Point me out the happy man and I will point you out either extreme egotism, selfishness, evil -- or else an absolute ignorance.”

“It's strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum's swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there.”

“So one always starts a journey in a strange land -- taking too many precautions, until one tires of the exertion and abandons care in the worst spot of all.”

“He said, ‘Oh god, help her. Damn me, I deserve it, but let her live forever.’ This was the love he should have felt for every soul in the world: all the fear and the wish to save concentrated unjustly on the one child. He began to weep.... He thought: This is what I should feel all the time for everyone.”

“There wasn't any point in being angry with anyone - the offender was too obviously myself...”