“Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled, just as the dead can never be counted.”

“I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him.”

“An ocean could not explain the distance we have traveled.”

“She'd spent years trying to explain herself to me (and I to her), but in the end, it had all been for nothing. I could recite her memories, but I could not feel them. She was another country, and I would never travel there.”

“And once he had seen this, he could never again see it otherwise, just as we cannot reconstruct an illusion once it has been explained.”

“It is not easy to measure the ocean, but we can be measured by it, confront it, and be in it.”