Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.

Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?

Sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love.

There's no greater misfortune than dying alone.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

He thought that the world would make more rapid progress without the burden of old people.

In that way the long-awaited visit, for which both had prepared questions and had even anticipated answers, was once more the usual everyday conversation.