Grandfather always said school’s a place where they take sixteen years to wear down your brain. Grandfather hardly went to school either.

Like you're riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an instant it's sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just barely for a few moments.

I was confident that I was a special person. But time slowly chips away at life. People don't just die when their time comes. They gradually die away, from the inside. And finally the day comes when you have to settle accounts. Nobody can escape it. People have to pay the price for what they've received. I have only just learned that truth.

Her voice was like a line from an old black-and-white Jean-Luc Godard movie, filtering in just beyond the frame of my consciousness.

If only I could fall sound asleep and wake up in my old reality!

There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.

My arm was not what she needed, but the arm of someone else. My warmth was not what she needed, but the warmth of someone else.