“Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past.”

“I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.”

“And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.”

“I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbablethat human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself,that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just aswell be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace normemory; and then all of a sudden they stop.”

“My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past..”

“She was parting from these Wilcoxes for the second time. Paul and his mother, ripple and great wave, had flowed into her life and ebbed out of it forever. The ripple had left no traces behind: the wave had strewn at her feet fragments torn from the unknown. A curious seeker, she stood for a while at the verge of the sea that tells so little, but tells a little, and watched the outgoing of this last tremendous tide.”