He understood. In the utter peace of the forests, he had met them all - uncles who had climbed mountain heights then fallen from them, uncles who had drowned in deep surging waters, uncles who had clawed to their deaths in the dirt of caved-in mines. By then, he wasn't afraid and they weren't alien any more. Like them, he would piece himself together again from scattered, shattered bone and then endure.

I am so afraid of being found out for the coward I am. All my life, I've managed to mask it with ambition and diligence.

Instead of cultivating sociability, she had only solidified her inborn solitude. She'd always had this dreamy quality about her and maintained as thin a relationship to the world around her as she could get away with.

Have you ever stopped to think that love is actually impossible? Maybe it’s just something which people have invented to torture themselves with. Love is elusive, doesn’t translate well into reality. When you have two people in so-called love, what do you really have but two people busily trying to enslave each other? The more in love they are, the more compulsively they strip each other of dignity, self-respect, identity, until there is nothing left.

Women’s strength is in the bonds they form with each other.