“I can't pretend it isn't about my life, she said to me once, it is m life. It's a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past. She fell silent, and the sensation created by her words -- I remember experiencing it as a subtle shift in the air pressure of the room -- deepened in the silence, so that all we could hear was the going and coming outside my office door. She had closed her eyes for a moment, as though she had fallen asleep. But then she continued, her shut eyelids now trembling. There are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn't right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it's not in the past, it is still with us today:; at least, it's still with me.”

“I had hoped for grace," I said, "not immortality"I wonder why so many people view sickness as a moral test. It has nothing to do with morals or grace. It's a physical test, and usually we lose.”

“I'll tell you why the six million matter so much: it is because the Jews are the chosen people. Forget the Cambodians, forget the American blacks, this is unique suffering. But I reject this idea. It is not a unique suffering. What about the twenty million under Stalin? It isn't better if you are killed for ideological reasons. Death is death. All death is suffering. Others have suffered too, and that is history, suffering.”

“Holly's forgiven you?" "Almost mostly. But she still gives me slack about it when she's sick. I take it as a husbandly badge," he said, puffing out his chest. "Sick? You told me she was fully immortal." "Yeah, but she still throws up some, because, well, the thing of it is... Ah, fuck, Rydstrom, I knocked her up." "You're going to be a father?" Gods help the world. I'm going to be an uncle? "I got Holly, like, on the first shot. Nix is calling me Bull's-eye and the Womb Raider.”

“So then she had to take it, though still with her defeated protest. "It isn't so much your BEING 'right'--it's your horrible sharp eye for what makes you so."Oh but you're just as bad yourself. You can't resist me when I point that out."She sighed it at last all comically, all tragically, away. "I can't indeed resist you."Then there we are!" said Strether.”

“You must have been determined, I said. Well, no, no, you don't think of it like that, she said, you just find what you must do, and you do it.”

“I sang my princess fast asleep,'Cause she was my dream come true,Oh Annmarie, believe me, I loved you.But now those lonely lullabies,Just dampen my tired eyes,Because I can't forget you.Because I can't forget you.”