Seeing him again after so long awakened something inside me. I was surprised to find myself feeling sad rather than joyful, as I would have imagined.

I had to wonder if men were so blinded by beauty that they would feel privileged to live their lives with an actual demon, so long as it was a beautiful demon.

If you keep your destiny in mind, every moment in life becomes an opportunity for moving closer to it.

If a few minutes of suffering could make me so angry, what would years of it do? Even a stone can be worn down with enough rain.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

Finally the homeless eel marked its territory, I suppose, and the Doctor lay heavily upon me, moist with sweat.

I began to feel that all the people I'd ever known who had died or left me had not in fact gone away, but continued to live on inside me just as this man's wife lived on inside him.