“It was a stillness so profound one had to adjust one’s hearing to it.....The silence seemed to be trying to tell him something about itself.”

“Silence, I discover, is something you can actually hear.”

“A moderate silence ensued. A neutral-to-slightly-positive silence. True, silence is still silence, except when you think about it too much.”

“A certain something, he felt, had managed to work its way in through a tiny opening and was trying to fill a blank space inside him. The void was not one that she had made. It had always been there inside him. She had merely managed to shine a special light on it.”

“When people tell a lie about something, they have to make up a bunch of lies to go with the first one. ‘Mythomania’ is the word for it.”

“There was something odd for him about not feeling lonely. The very fact that he had ceased to be lonely caused him to fear the possibility of becoming lonely again.”

“To know one’s own state is not a simple matter. One cannot look directly at one’s own face with one’s own eyes, for example. One has no choice but to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. Through experience, we come to believe that the image is correct, but that is all.”