“If one could have any girl one wanted at the drop of a hat, would one want one?”

“At some point during the summer of 1944 she started wearing two plaits instead of one, and sometimes wore her hair loose. It was … indescribable. That hair, a dark firefall, a molten mass, I would have given everything—everything!—to run my fingers through it, to have a taste of the girl, nothing else was important, you could have shown me thousands of similar creatures or even brought them to me, she was the one I wanted, no one else, only her, and wholly, entirely, with everything.And yet: my love could have lighted on any girl, on any one of all the pretty girls this side of death.”

“The girl in the mirror wasn't who I wanted to be and her life wasn't the one I wanted to have.”

“As if one could do what one wanted with one's own body!”

“Why would anyone want to turn back time? There is no meaning in regret, no point in thinking about thing I could have done. Because there is no guarantee that any decision is the right one.”

“How could one express in words these emotions of the body? Express that emptiness there? It was one's body feeling, not one's mind. To want and not to have sent all up her body a hardness, a hollowness, a strain. And then to want and not to have - to want and want - how that wrung the heart, and wrung it again and again.”