I am not in love with him, I am in love with ghosts. So is he, he's in love with ghosts.

...sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.

He walked out of the hospital into the sun, into open air for the first time in months, out of the green-lit rooms that lay like glass in his mind. He stood there breathing everything in, the hurry of everyone. First, he thought, I need shoes with rubber on the bottom. I need gelato.

For the first forty days a child is given dreams of previous lives. Journeys, winding paths, a hundred small lessons and then the past is erased.

So the books for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night.

That's one of the great sadnesses of any life - knowing what you know now and then remembering what you did not know then.

He has been disassembled by her. And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?