“Homer never wondered whether, after their many hand-to-hand struggles, Achilles or Ajax still had all their teeth.”

“Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.”

“He suddenly felt dismayed at how little he had seen of her the last two years; he had so few opportunities to press her hands in his to stop them from trembling.”

“he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love”

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”

“Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.”

“He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.”