“Staring out to sea, I finally forced myself to stop thinking of her as someone still somewhere, if only in memory, still obscurely alive, breathing, doing, moving, but as a shovelful of ashes already scattered; as a broken link, a biological dead end, an eternal withdrawal from reality, a once complex object that now dwindled, dwindled, left nothing behind except a l like a fallen speck of soot on a blank sheet of paper.”

“What do I do now?I didn't think my heart could break any more than it already has.The pieces still inside of me feel like broken glass.Every time I take a breath, they stab into me.It never ends....”

“The two horsewomen of the apocalypse still win, despite their dwindling numbers.”

“Vanish.Pass into nothingness: the Keats line that frightened her.Fade as the blue nights fade, go as the brightness goes.Go back into the blue.I myself placed her ashes in the wall.I myself saw the cathedral doors locked at six.I know what it is I am now experiencing.I know what the frailty is, I know what the fear is.The fear is not for what is lost.What is lost is already in the wall.What is lost is already behind the locked doors.The fear is for what is still to be lost.You may see nothing still to be lost.Yet there is no day in her life on which I do not see her.”

“Is it still there?" I asked, staring at his head, bent over, as he wedged the stethoscope beneath my left breast. And then, before I could stop myself, "Does it sound broken?”

“The things here are stronger--the things that differentiate us from one another are too powerful. The common interest is no longer decisive. It has broken up already and given place to the interest of the individual. Now and then something still will shine through from that other time when we all wore the same rig, but already it is dwindled and dim. These others here are still our comrades and yet our comrades no longer--that is what is so sad. All else went west in the war, but comradeship we did believe in; now only to find that what death could not do, life is achieving; it is driving us asunder.”