“People can only be found in what they do.”

“I tell you Charlie, I was there waiting in that field. waiting for Ede and Tom to find me. You don't think two people come together for nothing, do you? They were together because I was waiting to be found..." Then she looked straight into my face and said to me: "You know it, too, Charlie. All that time you waited for me to find you. What if I hadn't? What if I'd said: I won't?" She turned, and clinging to my arm, she surveyed the fields of snow the stretched away to the confining wall.”

“What you people who weren't yet born can never know is what it meant to sleep in cities under silent falls of snow when all night long the only sounds you heard were dogs that parked at trains that passed so far away they took a short cut through your dreams and no one even woke. It was the war that changed that. It was. After the Great War for Civilization - sleep was different everywhere...”

“...no one belongs to anyone. We're all cut off at birth with a knife and left at the mercy of strangers. You hear that? Strangers. I know what you want to do. I know you're going to go away to be a soldier. Well-you can go to hell. I'm not responsible. I'm just another stranger. Birth I can give you-but life I cannot. I can't keep anyone alive. Not anymore.”

“Here was an unknown quantity-a child in breeches with a blue scarf wound around his neck whose job it was to get them out and back alive. This...was the greatest terror of war: what you didn't know of the men who told you what to do-where to go and when. What if they were mad-or stupid? What if their fear was greater than yours? Or what if they were brave and crazy-wanting and demanding bravery from you? He looked away. He thought of being born-and trusting your parents. Maybe that was the same. Your parents could be crazy too. Or stupid. Still-he'd rather his father was with him-telling him what to do. Then he smiled. He knew that his father would take one look at the crater and tell him not to go.”

“As for the myths, take anyone's life and deny that most of it is deliberate self-delusion - an aggrandizement - a mixture of lies and truth, of what was wanted and what was had, producing the necessary justification for having been granted life in the first place. I was struck like a match, Lily wrote. I had no option but to burn. You can put a period after that. Lily did. It was the story of her life.”

“With Tom, there had never been a door to close, only the grass to lie on, never a bed; no walls, no ceiling to shut them in - or others out. Only the moon to see them, only the moon, some stars and whatever it was that had flown up out of the field when Ede had cried 'don't' in the final seconds of their embrace. Don't - meaning don't withdraw.”