“He had come into a view of mutability, and I too could see that one is only ostensibly born to remain in specified limits.”

“and then he could not see her come into a room without a sense of the flowing of robes, of the flowering of blossoms, of the purple waves of the sea, of all things that are lovely and mutable on the surface but still and passionate in their heart.”

“I didn't understand it then, but I've come to see he was right about his choice to leave his country limiting him forever. We are all confined by what we choose. If I had taken the gift of his question, if I had shown him even the smallest piece of private history, things might be different today. But I was silent and have chosen to remain so for too long. Now even the smallest revelation would seem cataclysmic.”

“In the depths of him, he too didn't want to go. But he was a born American, and if anything was on show, he had to see it. That was Life.”

“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”

“I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it—and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry. The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.”