“Sometimes two people will regard each other over a gulf too wide to ever be bridged, and know immediately what could have happened, and that it never will.”

“For you see, when us people who know run into each other that's an event. It almost never happens. Sometimes we meet each other and neither guesses that the other is one who knows. That's a bad thing. It's happened to me a lot of times. But you see there are so few of us.”

“Once upon a time there were two countries, at war with each other. In order to make peace after many years of conflict, they decided to build a bridge across the ocean.But because they never learned each other’s language properly, they could never agree on the details, so the two halves of the bridge they started to build never met.To this day the bridge extends far into the ocean from both sides, and simply ends half way, miles in the wrong direction from the meeting point.And the two countries are still at war.”

“Absence does not so much make the heart grow fonder as give the heart time to integrate what it has not previously absorbed, time to make sense of what happened too quickly to have any meaning in the instant. This is always true. If it is in absence that people forget each other, it is also in the quiet pause of absence that, minds running in symmetry, people come to know each other; there is sometimes as much intimacy in the span of continents as in the shared hours before dawn.”

“That is why it could happen anywhere, given the right ingredients: particular people in government, competing with others- or with each other- over natural and wealth-creating resources.”

“Life is too frickin' crazy sometimes, it really is.... You never know what's going to happen, do you.”