“To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed.”

“But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.”

“Trench dirt didn't always wash out, I am sure.”

“Whose sleeve do I have to grip, to tell my story to? It used to be Bet. Now, sleeveless. And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance, 'feasting' on her energy, and giving nothing back. Well, maybe. We had most excellent days. We were the king and queen of coffee in the morning, in the dark of winter, in the early morning sun of summer that came right in our windows, right in, to wake us. Ah, yes, small matters. Small matters, that we call sanity, or the cloth that makes sanity. Talking to her in those times made - no, God preserve me from sentimentality. Those days are over. Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.”

“I am dwelling on things I love, even if a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough”

“Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.”

“It had been a war of kingly poisons, in the air, in the memory, in the blood.”