“Surviving - that is the other name of a mourning whose possibility is never to be awaited.”

“Here again, the difference between the effective and the virtual, between mourning and its possibility, seems fragile and porous. The anguished apprehension of mourning (without which the act of friendship would not spring forth in its very energy) insinuates itself a priori and anticipates itself; it haunts and plunges the friend, before mourning, into mourning. This apprehension weeps before the lamentation, it weeps death before death, and this is the very respiration of friendship, the extreme of its possibility. Hence surviving is at once the essence, the origin and the possibility, the condition of possibility of friendship; it is the grieved act of loving. This time of surviving thus gives the time of friendship.”

“Your mysterious young friend, whose name you have never told me, but whose picture really fascinates me, never thinks.”

“I had to cease to mourn what could never be and make the most of what was possible. And I would begin doing that by trying to mend the hurts of the past.”

“We'd all mourn for a while, but at the end of the day we were a tough lot, and we'd survive.”

“I am the only being whose doom no tongue would ask, no eye would mourn.”