Clara

I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world. 

And perhaps it is the greater grief, after all, to be left on earth when another is gone. 

When he died, all things soft and beautiful and bright would be buried with him. 

You can use a spear as a walking stick, but that will not change its nature.

“Sometimes the smartest remark is silence.”

“The heart dies a slow death. Shedding each hope like leaves, until one day there are none. No hopes. Nothing remains.”

“We must not expect happiness. It is not something we deserve. When life goes well, it is a sudden gift; it cannot last forever.”

“My mother always said my sister was like wood. As rooted to the Earth as a sakura tree. But she told me I was like water. Water can carve its way through stone. And when trapped, water makes a new path.”

An ugliness unfurled in the moonlight and soft shadow and suffused the whole world. If I were an amoeba, he thought, with an infinitesimal body, I could defeat ugliness. A man isn't tiny or giant enough to defeat anything.

He found himself in the strange predicament all sailors share: essentially he belonged neither to the land nor to the sea. Possibly a man who hates the land should dwell on shore forever. Alienation and the long voyages at sea will compel him once again to dream of it, torment him with the absurdity of longing for something that he loathes.

“Marianne had the sense that her real life was happening somewhere very far away, happening without her, and she didn't know if she would ever find out where it was or become part of it.”

Conell wished he knew how other people conducted their private lives, so that he could copy from example

Marianne wonders what it would be like to belong here, to walk down the street greeting people amd smiling. To feel that life was happening here, in this place, and not somewhere else far away

Who were you? She thinks, now that theres no one left to answer the question.

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”

Connell is silent again. He leans down and kisses her on the forehead. I would never hurt you, okay? he says. Never. She nods and says nothing. You make me really happy, he says. His hand moves over her hair and he adds: I love you. I'm not just saying that, I really do. Her eyes fill up with tears again and she closes them. Even in memory she will find this moment unbearably intense, and she's aware of this now, while it's happening. She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed, she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life.