“They're beautiful. But sad.'Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”

“His statement to himself should have been 'I possess this now,therefore I am happy' , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.”

“It's like the day you realize dolls are dolls. I pick up my old self and I see it's silly. A toy I've played with too often. It's a little sad, like an old golliwog at the bottom of the cupboard. Innocent and used-up and proud and silly.”

“Each death laid a dreadful charge of complicity on the living; each death was incongenerous, its guilt irreducible, its sadness immortal; a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.”

“She died."I had to prompt him."Soon after?""In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital.""Poor girl.""All past. All under the sea.""You make it seem present.""I do not wish to make you sad.""The scent of lilac.""Old man's sentiment. Forgive me."There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way."Is this why you never married?""The dead live."The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension."How do they live?"And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke."By love.”

“If you forget everything else about me, please remember this. I walked down that street and I never looked back and I love you. I love you. I love you so much that I shall hate you for ever for today.”

“You're not me. You can't feel like I feel.""I can feel.""No you can't. You just choose not to feel or something and everything's fine.""It's not fine. It's just not so bad.”