What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them?

They were not friends. They didn't know each other. It struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time, true for the people he had known in the past and for those he would know in the future: each had stood and would stand before him, and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike. For an instant the wordless shock of his realization seemed more than he could bear.

He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with.They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn' t that worth something? He existed.

The conversation seemed just as boring and forgettable as details of American history around 1805, for example.

Everything human is alien to me.

one blow in anger [would] kill, probably, a child from aged two to eight. Those over eight would take two blows to kill.

Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.