“Between grief and nothing, I will take grief.”

“Because if memory exists outside of the flesh it won't be memory because it won't know what it remembers so when she became not then half of memory became not and if I become not then all of remembering will cease to be. -Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”

“There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”

“...no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.”

“Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”

“She wasn’t too big, heroic, what they call Junoesque. It was that there was just too much of what she was for any one human female package to contain, and hold: too much of white, too much of female, too much of maybe just glory, I don’t know: so that at first sight of her you felt a kind of shock of gratitude just for being alive and being male at the same instance with her in space and time, and then in the next second and forever after a kind of despair because you knew there would never be enough of any one male to match and hold and deserve her; grief forever after because forever after nothing less would ever do. ”

“There is no such thing as was-only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.”