“But it's love that does us in.”

“Why does the mind do such things? Turn on us, rend us, dig the claws in. If you get hungry enough, they say, you start eating your own heart. Maybe it's much the same.”

“Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill?”

“A prison does not only lock its inmates inside, it keeps all others out. Her strongest prison is of her own construction.”

“But maybe, underneath, she loves him too much. Maybe it's her excessive love that pushes him away.”

“Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.”

“But we still find the world astounding, we can't get enough of it; even as it shrivels, even as its many lights flicker and are extinguished (the tigers, the leopard frogs, the plunging dolphin flukes), flicker and are extinguished, by us, by us, we gaze and gaze. Where do you draw the line, between love and greed? We never did know, we always wanted more. We want to take it all in, for one last time, we want to eat the world with our eyes.”