“She says people ought to learn to live like them, with the body abandoned in a wilderness, and in the mind the memory of a single kiss, a single word, a single look to stand for a whole love.”

“The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”

“He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.”

“He wanted to pay her; he thought women ought to be paid for keeping men from dying or going out of their minds.”

“...as long as nothing happens between them, the memory is cursed with what hasn't happened.”

“Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.”

“she can remember everyone admiring a rare kind of evening they spoke of as something they ought to save from oblivion to describe to their children later. And that for her part she would have had it hidden, had that late summer evening buried and burned to ashes.”