“You are interested in a person, not in life, and people die or leave us ... But if you are interested in life it never lets you down. I am interested in the blueness of cheese. You don't do crosswords, do you, Mr. Wormold? I do, and they are like people: one reaches an end. I can finish any crossword within an hour, but I have a discovery concerning the blueness of cheese that will never come to a conclusion.”

“I am interested in the blueness of the cheese.”

“I can never think of you as a friend. You can do without a friend.”

“Nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here.”

“I thought I am kissing pain and pain belongs to You as happiness never does. I love You in Your pain. I could almost taste metal and salt in the skin, and I thought, How good you are. You might have killed us with happiness, but You let us be with You in pain.”

“I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy."You just want an excuse. If I sleep with anybody else, you feel you can do the same - any time."That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all."You'd make my bed for me?"Perhaps.”

“She had always called me ‘you.’ ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me.”