“Our troubles are but mayflies, rising and falling between the turn of dawn and dusk. And then they are gone to the houses of memory, you and I will remain, Yukiko.”

“All the mortal world is a lethal enemy during those hours between dawn and dusk.”

“Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.”

“People change, he thought -it's truism- but how? Our life is confined to days, after all: Sunday to Monday, dusk to dawn. What great alterations can take place in someone between breakfast and lunch? Is it possible to wake up as one person and fall asleep as another?”

“I began to know that each morning reasserted the problems of night before, that sleep suspended all but changed nothing, that you couldn’t make yourself over between dawn and dusk.”

“Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.”