“Then there was the war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love.”

“If nothing else, I have learned that aging has nothing to do with the accumulation of years. Aging is the inevitable defeat of parents by their young.”

“I would have married her before I went away to war too, just to make sure that someone else didn’t.”

“I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.”

“I wasn't going to be able to fall in love like a normal person. Not when I was bleeding over someone else.”

“Perhaps there is really nothing else when everything is falling to pieces, I think, except this bit of togetherness and even that is a sweet deception, for when someone else really needs you you cannot follow him or stand by him. I have noticed that often enough in the war when I looked into the face of a dead comrade. Each one of us has his own death and must suffer it alone; no one can help him then.”