“They looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.”

“A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.”

“Some men there were who know how to look at a lady, and make her feel she'd been seen. Or perhaps there was no question of knowing how. Some men just looked at ladies that way. [...] Tell me what absorbs you so, such a man might say. I wonder at your thoughts. He might even guess. It's to do with cards, isn't it?”

“Even as a small child, I understood that woman had secrets, and that some of these were only to be told to daughters. In this way we were bound together for eternity.”

“You were the light when my entire world was dark. You gave me a reason to keep going when all I wanted to do was give up.”

“When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic, yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled.”