“Towards the end of the season it is not bad to have the body. To have experienced joy as the mere lifting of hunger is not to have known it less.”

“...love / is turning out the lights when others do, a curfew we / would take / for sails.”

“This is freedom. This is the face of faith, nobody getswhat they want. Never again are you the same. The longingis to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more byeach glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself.Also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of somethingat sea. Here hands full of sand, letting it sift through in the wind, I look in and say take this, hurry. And if I listennow? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was onlysomething I did. I could not chose words. I am free to go.I cannot, of course, come back. Not to this. Never.It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.”

“This is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets what they want. Never again are you the same. The longingis to be pure. What you get is to be changed.”

“His mother is dead, yet she has never not been, in theory, at his shoulder. He wants her not to have known and suffered or even witnessed all the things that followed her death. Including all this now. But that would be like wishing her dead. Merely dead.”

“All good novelists have bad memories.”

“She hated having a heart. It was just an organ, she knew. An organ of the human body. Hearts didn't have really break. Emotion lay in the soul.”