“And we feel that the hero has lived all the details of this night like annunciations, promises, or even that he lived only those that were promises, blind and deaf to all that did not herald adventure. We forget that the future was not yet there; the man was walking in the night without forethought, a night which offered him a choice of dull rich prizes, and he did not make his choice.”

“Because to take away a man's freedom of choice, even his freedom to make the wrong choice, is to manipulate him as though he were a puppet and not a person.”

“The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.”

“Try to live with the same intensity as a child. He doesn't ask for explanations; he dives into each day as if it were a new adventure and, at night, sleeps tired and happy.”

“In the pool, on that last night of the last summer, we said we’d always come back. It’s scary how easy promises were broken. Just like that.”

“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible. If he has to make a choice, may he make it now. Then I will either wait for him or forget him.”

“The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.”

“It was as if this night were only one of thousands of nights, world without end, night curving into night to make a great arching line of which I couldn’t see the end, a night in which I roamed alone under cold, mindless stars.”

“It was one of the warm nights at the end of summer that makes promises that won't be kept.”

“Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth…It has no day.”