"Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by suprise"

"It was as if sadness were a chemical element that everything he touched consisted of"

"That's what everyone thinks," my mother said. "They think they're not like other people. But then life teaches you some lessons."

"Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential"

"My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal"

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even povertry, nor sudden money, nor the moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other

"And we'll never love anyone else but each other"
"No. Never."

...where we would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. That was where we could go

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil

I can't think of a moment when I have broken form, become another version of myself that I want and need to forget [...] I follow the rules of who I know myself to be and can't seem to be anything else, not even in moments of great stress when surely a meltdown would be acceptable

When it comes to my memory there are three categories: things I want to forget, things I can't forget, and things I forgot I'd forgotten until I remember them

My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; times is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it

It disturbs me that he can remember some of these things about himself, but not others, that the things he's lost or misplaces exist now only for me. If he's forgotten so much, what have I forgotten?

The past has become discontinuos, like stones skipped across water, like postcards

I look at him with the nostalgic affection men are said to feel for their wars, their fellow veterans. I think, I once threw things at this man

The important parts exist in the silences between the words

We are survivors, of each other

This goes along with another belief of mine: that everyone else my age is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise

You don't loook back along time but down trough it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away