“She had wanted every part of the marriage to be great. Howie was a strange person. You wanted to know him. He was like a little house with a door in the front and a door in the back. One room. He’d let you in his house and it was fun. Chuckles and games. No pressure. So you wanted to know him better and so you went through the doorway into what was going to be the next room of his personal house, but you found yourself back out in the yard, and the little house looked just the same, back and front. One room.” (62)

” You can walk down ten thousand crowded streets in ten thousand cities of the world, and nobody will give damn one about whether you cope or can’t cope, whether you live or die. The ones who notice you wonder if there’s any safe way to use you, or they give you a part in the little fantasy theater inside their skulls. There is an estimated price on you clothes, shoes and purse, but the rest of you is just so much live meat. Pretty meat. No bonus for how well you perform the feat of living.”
“That is so goddamn cold!” she said loudly.
“Scare you?”
“I guess.”
“That’s the way it is. Nobody grades your performance except you and your own ghosts. And you’ve gotten so anxious about the scoring, you hallucinated.”” (70)

“Rilke quotation: ‘Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.’” (73)

“Gian Gravina? ‘A bore is a person who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.’ ” (166)

“I backed out onto the street and paused for a moment and looked at that house again. It looked exactly the same, but it had fallen down. Those big boxes were emptier than ever before. There was no good way he could mend it. She knew and he knew and I knew that he should have gone directly from his talk with Collier to the authorities and explained what he was being asked to do and why. He shouldn’t even have paused to pick up a personal lawyer to sit in. Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will. Integrity is not a search for the rewards for integrity. Maybe all you ever get for it is the largest kick in the ass the world can provide. It is not supposed to be a productive asset. Crime pays a lot better. I can bend my own rules way, way over, but there is a place where I finally stop bending them. I can recognize the feeling. I’ve been there a lot of times.” (205)

“All creatures seem to seek comfort in routine. The cows bawl at first light for the milker. In Ireland the cows are milked at ten, a more reasonable hour, and begin their bawling then, if the ceremony is delayed. The cat comes to the kitchen at five, sits to wash, knowing it is time for supper. (Take a note: Check with Chookie and see how fares the cat name of Raoul I turned over to her after somebody strangled the lady who owned him.)
We put on the same shoe first every time and take off the same one first every time, and feel obscurely uneasy when we vary our dumb little pattern. We start the shave at the same place every time, put on a hat at the angle that feels right because it feels like all the other times.
Patterns hold us in place, give us identity. And patterns are a kind of freedom, because if all the little motions of life vary each time, they require thought. When the memories are imprinted in the fibers of the nerves and muscles, the shoes are on, the face shaved, the belt latched, with no conscious awareness of how it happened.” (241)

“It was at Teruel that he ran into Elisabeth Eidenbenz for the second time.
“… In a lull between two enemy attacks, Victor bumped into her next to one of the food supply trucks. “Hello there, do you remember me?” Elisabeth greeted him in a Spanish enriched by guttural German sounds. Of course he remembered her, but seeing her left him dumbstruck. She looked more mature and more beautiful than ever. They sat on a piece of concrete rubble; he began to smoke, and she drank tea from a canteen.
“What’s become of your friend Aitor?” she asked him.
“He’s still around in the thick of it, without a scratch.”
“He’s not afraid of anything. Say hello to him from me.”
“What plans do you have for when this war is over?” Victor asked.
“To find another one. There’s always war somewhere in the world. What about you?”
“If you like, we could get married,” he suggested, overcome with shyness.
“She laughed, and for a moment became a Renaissance maiden once more.
“Not on your life, man. I’m not going to get married to you or anyone else. I don’t have time for love.
“Maybe you will change your mind. Do you think we’ll meet again?”
“Without a doubt, if we survive. You can count on me, Victor, if there’s any way I can help you…”
“The same goes for me. May I kiss you?”
“No.” (8)

“The conservatives and Catholic Church, who had invested money, propaganda, and apocalyptic sermons from the pulpit in the opposition cause, were defeated at the 1936 general elections by the Popular Front, a coalition of left-wing parties. Spain was split in two as if struck by an axe. Claiming they wanted to restore order to a situation they said was chaotic (even though this was far from the truth), the right wing immediately began plotting with the armed forces to overthrow the legitimate government made up of liberals, socialists, communists, and trade unionists, backed by the enthusiastic support of workers, peasants, and the majority of students and intellectuals.” (15)

“‘We have to defend democracy, but remember that not everything is politics. Without science, industry, and technology, no progress is possible, and without music and art, there’s no soul,’ he would maintain. (18)

“Carme thought education was as important as bread, and that anyone who could read and write had a duty to teach those abilities to others.” (18)

A few months later, when the Nationalist troops had occupied two-thirds of Spain and were continuing their advance, the young women’s desire to be in the vanguard was fulfilled. Two of them would be raped and have their throats cut in an attack by Moroccan troops. The third survived the three years of civil war and the following six of the Second World War, wandering in the shadows from one end of Europe to the other, until she was able to emigrate to the United States in 1950. She ended up in New York married to a Jewish intellectual who had fought in the Lincoln Brigade — but that’s another story. (29)

Perhaps they knew in their hearts they would never return to their homeland. Pablo Neruda stood on the quay waving a handkerchief until they disappeared from view. That day was engraved on his memory too, and years later he would write: Critics can erase all my poetry if they wish. But this poem, that I recall today, cannot be erased by anyone. (115)

“We can all turn into savages if we’re given a rifle and an order,” said another prisoner who had come over to them. (241)

It seemed to Victor he was listening to Roser in her final moments, reminding him that we human beings are gregarious, we’re not programmed for solitude, but to give and receive. That was why she insisted he mustn’t withdraw into old age, and even chose him a new partner. (313)

• “In the end, there are only two hard historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth upon which we can confidently rely: the first is that Jesus was a Jew who led a popular Jewish movement in Palestine at the beginning of the first century C.E.; the second is that Rome crucified him for doing so.” (Location 186)

• “He broke off lamely.  He was confused, painfully conscious of his inarticulateness.  He had felt the bigness and glow of life in what he had read, but his speech was inadequate.  He could not express what he felt, and to himself he likened himself to a sailor, in a strange ship, on a dark night, groping about in the unfamiliar running rigging.  Well, he decided, it was up to him to get acquainted in this new world.  He had never seen anything that he couldn’t get the hang of when he wanted to and it was about time for him to want to learn to talk the things that were inside of him so that she could understand.  She was bulking large on his horizon.”(Location 132)
• ”He looked up so many new words that when they recurred, he had forgotten their meaning and had to look them up again.  He devised the plan of writing the definitions in a note-book, and filled page after page with them.”(Location 709)
• “I should say the first thing of all would be to get a grammar.  Your grammar is—”  She had intended saying “awful,” but she amended it to “is not particularly good.”
  (Location 803)

• “First, we are evolutionarily wired with a negativity bias, meaning we pay closer attention to what’s difficult with our kids (or with ourselves, our partners, even the world at large) than to what is working well. Second, our experiences of our own childhoods influence how we perceive and respond to our kids’ behavior. So many of us had parents who led with judgment rather than curiosity, criticism instead of understanding, punishment instead of discussion.” (Location 539)

• “They called him Ferdinand the Fierce and all the Banderilleros were afraid of him and the Picadores were afraid of him and the Matador was scared stiff.” (56).

• “…all old men do is talk of their past and drink. Now that I am an old man I know this to be true. There builds in you a great desire to share what you are. What you have done and seen of the world. It is not so much to tell others how to be but to show that you were busy in life.” (144).