“She sleeps and sometimes she dreams him, and it is wrenching to wake up. There is no talk in these dreams, no actual words, but she knows what he wants; he wants her to follow him. How awful. Death has made him selfish. [...] When she wakes up she is full of guilt because she decided to stay. Something rigid and life-loving and unwilling to cave in takes over. She betrays him in this way, every single night of her life, and it's exhausting. She denies him, she forgets him. Every time she says no to him in a dream, she forgets him a little bit more.”

“Keir was almost shocked by the rush of tenderness he felt. “No, dinna be nervous with me.” He took her against him, nestling her to his chest. “I would never harm you. You’re safer in my arms than anywhere outside them.”

“What would I like to get away from? Complexity. Anxiety. A feeling I've had my whole life that at any given time there's something I'm forgetting, some detail or chore, something that I'm supposed to be doing or should have already done. That nagging sensation - I get up with it, I go through the day with it, I go to sleep with it. When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do. Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework.”

“Falling in love was easy.anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky”

“Why? As much fun as a hospital sounds, I'd rather spend the evening dancing with an amazing, smart, funny, interesting, beautiful girl who has the most incredible green eyes I've ever seen. Sophie, will you go to the dance with me?”

“What do those people think? That there is nothing more terrible than death. They themselves have invented Death, they are themselves afraid of it, and they try to frighten us with it.”

“as a well-spent day gives, joy in sleep so a well-spent life brings, joy in dying”

“What energy!' I thought. 'Man has conquered everything, and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won't submit.”