“If you are not loved, but do not know for sure whether a potential rival is loved or not, and, if there are several, do not know which of them is luckier than you; if you subsist on that hopeful ignorance which helps you to resolve in conjecture an otherwise intolerable agitation; then all is well, you can live. But woe when the name is at last announced, and that name is not yours! For she was so enchanting, it even brought tears to one’s eyes, and, at the merest thought of her, a moaning, awful, salty night would well up within me … yes, everything about her was excruciating and somehow irremediable, and only in my dreams, drenched with tears, did I at last embrace her and feel under my lips her neck and the hollow of her clavicle. But she would always break away, and I would awaken, still throbbing.”

“Ada stood with her back against the back of a tree, like a beautiful spy who has just rejected the blindfold”

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn. If they do this kind of thing to me every morning, they will get me trained and I shall become quite wooden.”

“I am not handsome, I am not interesting, I am not talented. I am not even rich. But, Lise, I offer you everything I have, to the last blood corpuscle, to the last tear, everything. And, believe me, this is more than any genius can offer you because a genius needs to keep so much in store, and thus cannot offer you the whole of himself as I do.”