“Our interactions were confined to a nod as I settled down into my seat. A few days into our routine and we were like an old married couple--we'd just missed out the honeymoon and skipped straight from flirtation to habit." from "First Impressions”

“It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.”

“In the weeks that followed, we amazed ourselves. Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment? ”

“We're no longer young men. We've lost any desire to conquer the world. We are refugees. We are fleeing from ourselves. From our lives. We were eighteen years old, and we had just begun to love the world and to love being in it; but we had to shoot at it. The first shell to land went straight for our hearts. We've been cut off from real action, from getting on, from progress. We don't believe in those things any more; we believe in the war.”

“When it's all over and the dust from our Ancestors bodies and our own settle from the four winds only then will we see that we were here!”

“We always remember our first love as if they were our last and wish our last love was just like our first.”