“This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel…”

“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.”

“The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it”

“A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes.”

“Sth, I know that woman. She used to live with a flock of birds on Lenox Avenue. Know her husband, too. He fell for an eighteen-year-old girl with one of those deepdown, spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going. When the woman, her name is Violet, went to the funeral to see the girl and to cut her dead face they threw her to the floor and out of the church. She ran, then, through all that snow, and when she got back to her apartment she took the birds from their cages and set them out the windows to freeze or fly, including the parrot that said, "I love you."”

“He was as young as twenty years allowed, and as old as it could make him.”

“He saw the girl watching him and he smiled at her. It was an old smile that he had been using for fifty years, ever since he first smiled…”

“The first boy I fell in love with didn't know I loved him, but he managed to break my heart anyway.”

“When he loved his bride it was not a queen he loved, but rather the girl as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.”

“What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?”