He's so proud of you, Archie, his mother said. He just doesn't know what to say or how to say it. He's a man who never learned how to talk.

A crowd could sometimes express a hidden truth that no one person in the crowd would have dared to express on his own.

He understood that fourteen was the worst possible age on the calendar of human life, and therefore all fourteen-year-olds were confused and fractured beings, not one of them a child anymore and not one of them an adult, none quite right in the head or at home in his unfinished body.

War announces the beginning of a new reality, but nothing had begun that day, a reality had ended, that was all, something had been subtracted from the world, and now there was a hole, a nothing where there had once been a something, as if every tree in the world had vanished, as if the very concept of tree or mountain or moon had been erased from the human mind.

Let the woman behind him sob her heart out, it probably made her feel better, but he would never feel better and therefore he didn't have the right to cry, he only had the right to think, to try to understand what was happening, this big thing that resembled nothing else that ever happened to him.

That was perhaps their greatest bond, the need for music that ran through their bodies, which at that point in their lives was no different from the need to find a way to exist in the world.

What a curious pair they were - a wounded boy screaming love with each act of hostility towards his father and a wounded father emanating love by not slapping him down, by letting himself be punched.

[...] which was perhaps the real definition of happiness, not knowing you were happy, not caring about anything except being alive in the now.

She could never feel at home in this world, could live in the present only as a kind of tourist, as if she were just passing through, longing to go back to where she had come from.

She made herself angry, because it was easier for her than being upset.

His body was a graveyard of buried emotion.

The crisis was not in the past but in clinging to the past.

It was not the end of the closeness but the end of the longing for closeness that he had to mourn.

Resentment is drinking the poison, and hoping that someone else will die.

Personality seemed to her at once absurd and compulsive: she remained trapped inside it even when she could see through it.

I know you prefer anger because you think it's less humiliating

Nobody ever died of a feeling, he would say to himself, not beliving a word of it.

'If the past was going to destroy you it already would have.'
'Not necessarily. It might have been waiting for just the right moment. The past has all the time in the world. It's only the future which is running out.'

Determined not to inflict the causes of his suffering on his children, he couldn't protect them from the consequences.

I get these horrible moments of vertigo. I suddenly feels as if I don't exist.