“Despite the loss they were suffering, they'd both relaxed - as people do when they realize they've run out of chances for happiness”

“Despite his crimped shirts and flowing mane (or perhaps because of them) I had seen no evidence as yet that Nathaniel even knew what a girl was. If he'd ever met one, chances are they'd both have run screaming in opposite directions.”

“People desire so many things and waste their days in vain... Some yearn for gold, others for power, yet others for glory and a higher station. But when death's moment nears and they look back at their lives, they realize they've been happy only during those moments when they've loved.”

“When we slid the body into the grave, we both were shaken to the core. The loss we felt was not the loss of ham but the loss of pig.”

“They were now both ready, not to begin from scratch, but to continue with a love that had survived for thirteen years in hibernation. They were no longer travellers without baggage. They were no longer twenty. They'd both been around the block a bit and had suffered without the other. They'd both lost their way without the other. Each had tried to find love with other people.But all that was now finished.”

“That people were manifold creatures didn’t come as a surprise to the Swede, even if it was a bit of a shock to realize it anew when someone let you down. What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would once have felt sorry for”