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Very beautiful people have that effect, she thinks, they obliterate you

If you touched her, some of her might come off on you. She was contagious, and better left alone

All history is written backwards

Her suprise is for other people's hopefulness, their innocence, their mushy desire that everything will somehow turn out for the best

Loss opens again beneath her feet, the pit, the familiar trapdoor

They were all victims! They took turns! Actually, they took turns trying to avoid being the victims. That's the whole point about war!

Desperate people alarm her, she grew up with two of them. They'll hit out, they'll grab at anything

It sounded rehearsed, a phrase he'd assembled around his real feelings like a screen

[...] she had the kind of beauty that people write songs about and occasionally commit suicide over

I was new to champagne, but as soon as I tasted it, spark after golden spark, I thought, well, there's magic in this water

Nobody ever warned me about mirrors, so for many years I was fond of them, and belived them to be trustworthy

"How can I describe the pool of grief into which I was now falling? I can't describe it, and so I won't try"

"Overnight, whole portions of what had been acknowledged as reality simply vanished. This is what happens when there's a war."

"How they'd loved to cut themselves on each other, taste their own blood. We were ruinous together, she thinks. But how else can we live, these days, except in the midst of ruin? Sometimes she wants to put a match to him, have done with him; finish with that endless, useless longing."

"When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too - leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back. Time in dreams are frozen. You can never get away from where you've been"

"You can never see yourself the way you are to someone else"

"Just when you need it, just when you could use an arm or a leg, suddenly the body has other things to do. It falters, it buckles under you; it melts away as if made by snow, leaving nothing much."

"The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself"

"Children belive that everything bad that happens is somehow their fault, and in this I was no exception; but they also believe in happy endings, despite all evidence to the contrary, and I was no exception in that either"

"Tell me where it hurts", she'd say. "Stop howling. Just calm down and show me where." But some people can't tell where it hurts. They can't calm down. They can't ever stop howling.