“None could discern in him the shyness that makes a person so conspicuous among people who know each other well and are bound together by the established echoes of private jokes and by an allusive residue of people's names that to them are alive with special significance, making the newcomer feel as if the magazine story he has started to read had really begun long ago ... and he wonders if they have not deliberately contrived a conversation to which he is a stranger.”

“He was the smartest and best-read person any of us had every known, but he wore his learning so lightly and had such curiosity about other people that he had the ability to make everyone around him feel smart and well-read.”

“Hey Clark', he said.'Tell me something good'. I stared out of the window at the bright-blue Swiss sky and I told him a story of two people. Two people who shouldn't have met, and who didn't like each other much when they did, but who found they were the only two people in the world who could possibly have understood each other. And I told him of the adventures they had, the places they had gone, and the things I had seen that I had never expected to. I conjured for him electric skies and iridescent seas and evenings full of laughter and silly jokes. I drew a world for him, a world far from a Swiss industrial estate, a world in which he was still somehow the person he had wanted to be. I drew the world he had created for me, full of wonder and possibility.”

“Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.”

“(Perhaps he realized that) two damaged people could never really make a whole undamaged person between them.”

“Maybe people are strangers because time makes them strangers, not because you don't know them, and people you've never met are strangers because you've spent so long not knowing them.”