“All stories are love stories.”

“The human route to sympathy or empathy is a clumsy one but it's all we've got. To understand the consequences of our actions we must exercise our imaginations.”

“There are those nights wehn you're pushing thirty and life seems over. When you feel like you'll never tie up any ends and no one iwll ever kiss your lips again.”

“The chinese character for "strife" is represented by two women under the same roof.”

“Eva was a between-the-lines talker. She left the sayable unsaid and said what she meant without saying it.”

“Loss is like a shrapnel wound, I said, where the piece of metal's got stuck in a place where the surgeons daren't go, so they decide to leave it. It is painful at first, horribly painful, so that you wonder you can live with it. But then the body grows around it, until it doesn't hurt anymore. Not like it used to be. But every now and again there are these twinges when you are not ready for them, and you realize it is still there, and it's always going to be there. It is a part of you. A still, hard point inside.”

“The portuguese never put anything behind them except a chair to eat lunch.”