“Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone.Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe you have chosen it.”

“....whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end—it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion.”

“A broken heart is something even I can’t protect you from. I’ve been alone for so long, and believe me, all that does is provide a false sense of security. Being alone doesn’t erase the deep yearning that exists in all of us. We are not solitary creatures. You have to love and open your heart. If not, what is it we are trying to save? When it swallows you whole, remember it means you’ve lived.”

“And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.”

“There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.”

“There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.”

“I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.”