“There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yours...”

“Martin said, "It feels as though part of my self has detached and gone to Amsterdam, where itsheis waiting for me. Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome?" Julia nodded. "There's pain where she ou...”

“That is what madness is, isn't it? All the wheels fly off the bus and things don't make sense any more. Or rather, they do, but it's not a kind of sense anyone else can understand.”

“He was not in the house. He did not come back that night. Days went by, and at last she understood that he would not return at all.”

“You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.”

“When we were that young we invented the world, no one could tell us a thing.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don't think it's possible for you to miss me as much as I'm missing you right now”

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I'm gazing at a distant star. It's dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago.Maybe the star doesn't even exist any more. Yet sometimes that...”

“I want morning and noon and nightfall with you. I want your tears, your smiles, your kisses...the smell of your hair, the taste of your skin, the touch of your breath on my face. I want to see you ...”

“How do you mourn endless numbers of people in endless numbers of places? Is there a form for it, a requisite time and place for mourning? Is there ever an end to it? Can there ever be an end to it?”

“It's all rather political, mourning is.”

“And that was part of the tragedy: I had just started to know her. I was mourning the relationship that could have blossomed but didnt have a chance to grow.”