Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it's time for them to be hurt.

Probably." "Again with the probablys." "A world full of probablys," she said.

Memories and thoughts age, just as people do. But certain thoughts can never age, and certain memories can never fade.

Sometimes it's not the people who change, it's the mask that falls off.

It's like Tolstoy said. Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.

Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you!

Those were strange days, now that I look back at them. In the midst of life, everything revolved around death.