“If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk.”

“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended.”

“The future was one thing that could never be broken, because it had not yet had the chance to be anything.”

“I can’t tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove.”

“I had not thought that I was doing wrong; I had never taken so many things into consideration.”

“And my grandparents became very aware of one thing—that I enjoyed my aloneness. They had seen that I had no desire to go to the village to meet anybody, or to talk with anybody. Even if they wanted to talk, my answers were yes or no; I was not interested in talking either. They became aware of one thing—that I enjoyed my aloneness and it was their sacred duty not to disturb me.”

“And surely one of the best rules in conversation is, never to say a thing which any of the company can reasonably wish had been left unsaid…”

“It had to be one of the weirdest things in the universe that Lissa had never come close to suspecting my feelings for Dimitri but that Adrian had figured it out.”

“There were subjects we tackled that had never been even discussed, like I had an abortion. Nobody ever talked about that.”

“If one doesn't talk about a thing, it has never happened. It is simply expression that gives reality to things.”