“Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.”

“Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”

“Was it better to think you had lost everything, and to start over? Or easier to know that the people you loved were alive, even if you could never see them again?”

“"Do not die that we may not die," the dead cry out within you. "We had no time to enjoy the women we desired; be in time, sleep with them! We had no time to turn our thoughts into deeds; turn them into deeds! We had no time to grasp and to crystallize the face of our hope; make it firm!" …
But you must choose with care whom to hurl down again into the chasms of your blood, and whom you shall permit to mount once more into the light and the earth.”

“I’m glad we had the times together just to laugh and sing a song, seems like we just got started and then before you know it, the times we had together were gone.”

“The past was always there, lived inside of you, and it helped to make you who you were. But it had to be placed in perspective. The past could not dominate the future.”

“The inside jokes weren't jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.”

“The Allies had the resources, industry, and logistics of an entire planet. The Axis, on the other hand, had to depend on what scant assets they could scrape up within their borders. This time we were the Axis.”

“One had to build shelters. One had to make pockets and live inside them.”

“The curse of the middle-aged man was knowing — or believing — that he'd told all he had to tell. Soon as you suspect that, you started wanting something, anything, to prove it wasn't so: and that's where the mistakes started, when the bad things happened.”