“Why was it that silence sometimes felt like a physical thing with a weight of its own?”

“He had always felt that he lived on the edges of life, Constantine realized, watching everyone else living, sometimes helping them do it.”

“Sometimes she felt that her heart would ssurely break. But she knew that hearts did not literally break because their owners were unhappy - and foolish. How dreadfully foolish she had been. Yet she clung to the memories as to a lifeline.”

“Gifts were dangerous things, she thought. Sometimes one succeeded only in taking far more than one gave.”

“And so silence and ...darkness hold happiness and joy?" he said softly."Assuredly," she said, "provided one listens to the silence and gazes deeply into the darkness. Everything is there. Everything.”

“Life so often becomes a determined, relentless avoidance of pain - of one's own, of other people's. But sometimes pain has to be acknowledged and even touched so that one can move into it and through it and past it. Or else be destroyed by it.”

“Why had peace given place so soon to turmoil? To two separate solitudes? Because peace had been without thought? Without...integrity?How could she have felt like that without love?Was love essential?Did it even exist - the love she had dreamed of her life?If it did, it was too late now for her to find it.Must she make do with this instead, then?Only this?Pleasure without love?”