“I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings.”

“Back at home, after some prodding from Tereza, he admitted that he had been jealous watching her dance with a colleague of his. "You mean you were really jealous?" she asked him ten times or more, incredulously, as though someone had just informed her she had been awarded a Nobel Peace prize. Then she put her arm around his waist and began dancing across the room. The step she used was not the one she had shown off in the bar. It was more like a village polka, a wild romp that sent her legs flying in the air and her torso bounding all over the room, with Tomas in tow. Before long, unfortunately, she bagan to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealously not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden he would be saddled with until not long before his death.”

“I do a lot of biking. I need that mileage and the long-distance stuff because tennis demands it. My fitness trainer is always trying to convince me to do an Ironman. I can probably run the marathon, I can make the 112 miles on the bike, but I will never swim for 2.4 miles. I will die after 100 meters.”

“Society's dark hull drifts further and further away. It is this place - the place of our separation, our distinction - that much of his poetry occupies.”

“No one decides where I go, least of all myself, though each step is where it must be.”

“Make sure that today is better than yesterday.”

“It is still beautiful to hear the heart beatbut often the shadow seems more real than the body.”

“Every time I see you I fall in love all over again.”

“Whether I scare some people or not, I don't give a hoot. If you're not scared by now, nothing can scare you.”

“You can't move forward until you stop looking back.”

“(after Quigley explains that the ghosts have been feeding off of their misery)Toma: So, what, we should think happy thoughts?!Duane: That is not a talent of mine.”