“Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?”

“It's just that it's impossible to be a broken or whole person. You can only be a person. You can only exist, you can only belong to yourself, and you can only be responsible for your own happiness or belonging or whatever. That broken-part-piece-whole thing is just a trick of the mortal mind.”

“I'm not a very happy person," I told him."But sometimes I can trick myself into thinking I am.”

“I had the fleeting thought then that we are each of us pathetic in one way or another, and the trick is to marry a person whose patheticness you can tolerate.”

“She couldn't steal herself back from Randa only to give herself away again - belong to another person, be answerable to another person, build her very being around another person.”

“The greatest gift you can ever give another person is your own happiness”