“We’re always being made promises,’ she said. ‘You make them yourselfand you listen to others giving theirs. Politicians are always goingon about providing a better quality of life for people as they get older,and a health service in which nobody ever gets bedsores. Banks promiseyou high interest rates, some food promises to make you lose weight ifyou eat it, and body creams guarantee old age with fewer wrinkles. Lifeis quite simply a matter of cruising along in your own little boat througha constantly changing but never-ending stream of promises. And howmany do we remember? We forget the ones we would like to remember,and we remember the ones we’d prefer to forget.”

“You forget what you want to remember and remember what you would prefer to forget.”

“I remembered her once saying that life was like your shoes. You couldn't simply expect or imagine that your shoes would fit perfectly. Shoes that pinched your feet were a fact of life.”

“Do you know what the wind tastes like? […] Mysterious spices […] that tell us about people and events far away. That we can’t see. But that we can sense if we draw the wind deep into our mouths and then eat it.”

“There’s always an end. But the end is always the beginning of something else. The periods we write into our lives are always provisional, in one way or another.”

“Children get acquainted with each other in a special way, they do not make contracts as adults, they believe each other or not. Childish friendships often end in violence. You may become an enemy all of a sudden as well as notice that you are someone's best friend.”

“We live in an age when the mice are hunting the cats...nobody knows who are the mice and who the cats.”