“Bir yumruk onu meydana getiren parmakların toplamından fazla bir şeydir.”

“Bir erkeğin hayatında, tesadüflerin toplamından fazla bir şey yoktur...”

“Ama saygısız nankörlük genç insanların zırhıdır.O olmasa nasıl kalırlar hayatta,nasıl ilerlerler ? Yaşlı insanlar gençlerin iyiliğini ister ama kötülüğünü de ister : Onları tüketmek,canlılıklarını içlerine çekmek isterler,böylece kendileri ölümsüzlüğe erişsin diye.O haşinliğin kabalığın ve hafif meşrepliğin koruyucu zırhı olmasa,çocuklar geçmişin yükü altında ezilirler,başkalarının geçmişinin yükü altında,kendi sırtlarına yüklenen.Bencillik onları kurtaran bir lütuftur.”

“The way love feels is always only approximate. I would like to be without shame. I would like to be shameless. I would like to be ignorant. Then I would not know how ignorant I was.”

“Perhaps her mind is slipping, perhaps she's going off the tracks, perhaps she is coming unhinged. Unhinged, like a broken door, like a rammed gate, like a rusting strongbox. When you're unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside and other things get in that ought to be shut out." ~~Margaret Atwood”

“She did understand, or at least she understood that she was supposed to understand. She understood, and said nothing about it, and prayed for the power to forgive, and did forgive. But he can't have found living with her forgiveness all that easy. Breakfast in a haze of forgiveness: coffee with forgiveness, porridge with forgiveness, forgiveness on the buttered toast. He would have been helpless against it, for how can you repudiate something that is never spoken? She resented, too, the nurse, or the many nurses, who had attended my father in the various hospitals. She wished him to owe his recovery to her alone—to her care, to her tireless devotion. That is the other side of selflessness: its tyranny.”

“Possible, impossible. What could be done? We thought we had such problems. How were we to know we were happy?”