“Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.”

“I think i'm just breathing, that's all. And there's a difference between breathing and being alive.”

“It was as if he had known her for a long, long time and before he knew her, he knew nothing because he felt he had not existed then, life had been absent in his breaths.”

“We all have such stories. It is a brutal arithmetic. But I - I am alive. You are alive. As long as we breathe, we can see and hear. As long as we can remember, all those gone before are alive inside us.”

“For a long while- for many years, in fact- he had not thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and where the furniture has rotted away. But tonight it was as if lamps had been lighted through all the gloomy dead rooms. It had begun to happen when he saw Tico Feo coming through the dusk with his splendid guitar. Until that moment he had not been lonesome. Now, recognizing his loneliness, he felt alive. He had not wanted to be alive. To be alive was to remember brown rivers where the fish run, and sunlight on a lady's hair.”

“Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true.”