“So Connor stands there with secret anticipation each time there's a group of new arrivals, hoping beyond hope he'll find that self-righteous, self-important, pain-in-the-ass Lev still alive.”

“She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most.”

“But I was still alive, and in my book, where there's life, there's hope.”

“Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.”

“He walks through the house of his past, hoping he'll find the right door, hoping he'll find the key.”

“There's no one more obnoxious and self-righteous than the self-made man. And no one more admirable.”