“Three times I rushed toward her, desperate to hold her,
three times she fluttered through my fingers, sifting away
like a shadow, dissolving like a dream.”

“It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

“The way her fingers flutter through the space around her. Each a thing he hopes never to forget.”

“Hinged to forgetfulness like a door,
she slowly closed out of sight,
and she was the woman I loved,
but too many times she slept like
a mechanical deer in my caresses,
and I ached in the metal silence
of her dreams.”

“I would remain nearer you for what time there is."

"Gone in one faerie sigh," she quoted.

Leather-clad fingers brushed over her short hair, rested on her cheek. "I can hold my breath.”

“Like Machiavelli would say, little Jovana was five months old, and I was prepared to write even "I saw Feldmarshall Göring three times", just to slip away from the barracks for two days and see my little girl and her beautiful mother.”

“She was my dream. She made me who I am, and holding her in my arms was more natural to me than my own heartbeat. I think about her all the time. Even now, when I'm sitting here, I think about her. There could never have been another.”

“Tracy, the leader of the CDH group, looks at me with eyes that seem to belong to someone three times her age. It's something beyond wisdom, all the way to insanity and back. It's like her eyes are scarred from all the things she's seen.”

“Okay. I've got a good one." Simon stroked Isabelle's hair feeling her lashes flutter against his neck as she closed her eyes. "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

“Mr Lipwig, there's a lady in the hall to see you and we've thanked her for not smoking three times and she's still doing it!”