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“Wherever we go, however we behave, there'll always be something to drive us inside. That's where people want us to be. That was our mistake, right at the start of this whole business […] We went out when we weren't supposed to, we were too free, and this—all of this—is our punishment. It has nothing to do with the idea of us becoming dogs, and everything to do with the fact of us being girls”

“He didn't believe in the vicar's nonsense, in hellfire or heaven, but he envied his certainty. What lay before Joseph was unknowable, a gape. It scared him. Yet lying here, on this summer afternoon, he soothed himself with a question: How bad could it be to be buried in the warm earth and listen to the world conduct itself around you? That didn't seem so dreadful. For a moment, the simmering fear subsided.”

“When he was among them, the hungry men, he had learned as best he could to disguise his gentleness [...] Some of them were God-fearing, but their main god, the one at whose temple they worshipped most frequently, was vio-lence. When they weren't committing violent acts—brawling in the alehouse or beating their wives—violence seeped into their lives in other ways. It inflected their language.”

“He had not done anything wrong, and yet here he was, ashamed. That was the cunning power of girls, he thought. They turned a strong man weak. They made a good man penitent.”

“What drew people to admire a man, I came to see, was a man's way of admiring himself.”

“As you run off the platform and into the street, weaving towards your taxi, you experience a strange moment in which you are flung into the future, wondering how you will remember this. You would like a witness. You would like someone to stop you and ask, What are you doing?, to which you would reply, I'm doing what I feel.”

“You are made aware that you carry the house of your father, which means you also carry a part of the house he carried, your father's father’s [...] Your first instinct is to ball your hand into a fist, crushing the thing, letting the weight drift to the ground; but perhaps it would be necessary to prise open its doors, to search the rooms which are lit, glance into those which are not.”

“How does one shake off desire? To give it a voice is to sow a seed, knowing that somehow, someway, it will grow. It is to admit and submit to something which is on the outer limits of your understanding.
But even if this seed grows, even if the body lives, breathes, flourishes, there is no guarantee of reciprocation. Or that you'll ever see them again. Hence, the campaign for summer crushes.”

“It was banal, indisputably bourgeois, the coffee cups and the stupid pastries-but that was almost the point. To return to that ordinary life, with its coziness and safety, all those things that are so easy to despise and dismiss. In those rituals of daily life, I committed myself to the marriage, in all its mundanity, all over again. At least for a time.”

“People always talked about having children as an event, as a thing that took place, they forgot that not having children was also something that took place, that is to say it wasn't a question of absence, a question of lack, it had its own presence in the world, it was its own event.”

“The sight of it made her realize, as she hadn't quite realized before, that he, her former lover, had not felt the need to alter anything in his life since sending her away; his life continued as before,[…]; nothing had been altered for him, above all nothing had been altered in his soul, except the presence of her from whom he'd detached himself like one shrugging off a coat.”

“The will of human beings meant nothing, then, as the veterinarian always seemed to feel. People were no more than dolls set on tabletops, the springs in their backs wound up tight, dolls set to move in ways they could not choose, moving in directions they could not choose. Nearly all within range of the wind-up bird's cry were ruined, lost. Most of them died, plunging over the edge of the table.”

“They would follow without a second thought the orders of a superior, no matter how outlandish. Commanded in the name of the emperor to dig a hole through the earth to Brazil, they would grab a shovel and set to work. Some people called this ‘purity,’ but the veterinarian had other words for it.”

“Maybe the world was like a revolving door, it occurred to him as his consciousness was fading away. And which section you ended up in was just a matter of where your foot happened to fall [...] Maybe it was as simple as that. And there was no logical continuity from one section to another. And it was precisely because of this lack of logical continuity that choices really didn't mean very much.”

“She did not offer any explanations, and I did not ask for them. I simply did as I was told. This reminded me of several so-called art films I had seen in college. Movies like that never explained what was going on. Explanations were rejected as some kind of evil that could only destroy the films' ‘reality’.”

“What had I ever known about Kumiko? […] Could it be true that the Kumiko I had thought I understood, the Kumiko I had held close to me and joined my body with over the years as my wife—that Kumiko was nothing but the most superficial layer of the person Kumiko herself, just as the greater part of this world belongs in fact to the realm of the jellyfish?”

“Have you ever had that feeling-that you'd like to go to a whole different place and become a whole different self?”

“Fabienne and I did not dritt apart overnight, but through the summer and fall, even as we continued to spend time together, we both knew that it was futile. Quietness set in— not the quietness we used to share, the ease of two turtle-doves perched on a fence, neither making a sound but each attentive, ready to answer the other's cooing.”

“But her personality, I now understand, was impaired by her desire to be good and to be right. To be good was in her nature. However, where does the desire to be right lead one, if not to the wrong place?
[…] I was too young then to dread a person like her. I have since encountered other versions of Catalina; each time I have to reeducate myself in avoiding people's good intentions.”

“Morning and evening make a day. Days and nights make a week, a month, a life. Drop me into any moment, point me in any direction, and I could retrace my life. Details beget details. With all those details one might hope for the full picture. A full picture of what, though? The more we remember, the less we understand.”

“People like Mrs. Townsend, who are obsessed with keeping a full account of their lives, are like artists who create optical illusions. A year is a year anywhere, a day is a day for everyone, and yet with a few tricks these archivists make others believe that they have packed something into their days, something precious, enviable, everlasting, that is not available to everyone.”

“Often I imagine that living is a game of rock-paper-scissors: fate beats hope, hope beats ignorance, and ignorance beats fate. Or, in a version that has preoccupied me: the fatalistic attracts the hopeful, the hopeful attracts the ignorant, and the ignorant, the fatalistic.”

“Life is most difficult for those who know what they want and also know what makes it impossible for them to get what they want. Life is still difficult, but less so, for those who know what they want but have not realized that they will never get it. It is the least difficult for people who do not know what they want.”

“Happiness, I would tell her, is to spend every day without craning one's neck to look forward to tomorrow, next month, next year, and without holding out one's hands to stop every day from becoming yesterday.”

“my chickens, with their small brains, never seem to tire of walking around, pecking, cooing, clawing. The geese are much more tranquil. They do not flap their wings at the slightest disturbance, and when they float in the pond, they stay still for so long that you know they would not mind spending the rest of their lives suspended in their watery dreams. Yet geese are never called passive.”

“Sometimes you hear people say so-and-so has lived well, and so-and-so has had a dull life. They are missing a key point when they say that. Any experience is experience, any life a life […]
Some people count only what they seek as life […] What they make happen, to others and to themselves, and what they make impossible, for others and for themselves. To me, anything that happens is life.”

“What a tragedy that would have been, living an interchangeable life, looking for interchangeable excitements.”

“My parents were never cruel to me. Perhaps they were too worn-out to feel much of anything […]. No one can stop you from wanting something for your children, but most of the time what you want will never be granted. Some people have to become parents themselves to truly understand that. Not me. I learned that by watching my parents.”

“We forgive many people for what they cannot do for us, but not our mothers; we protect our mothers more than we protect others, too. Sometimes I think it may be just as well that I cannot have my own children: […] I would rather march through life without the futile protection from my children. People often forget that it is always a gamble to be a mother; I am not a gambler.”

“I could be myself only when I was with Fabienne. Can a wall describe its own dimensions and texture, can a wall even sense its own existence, if not for the ball that constantly bounces off of it?”