Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are.

I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.

You have to do something bad to do something good.

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

We could imagine all sorts of universes unlike this one, but this is the one that happened.

I thought, it's a shame that we have to live, but it's a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I'd had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her.

She laughed enough to migrate an entire flock of birds. That was how she said yes