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We remained sitting side by side in silence. What could we say? We had both seen too much to be able to do anything in the comforting line.

[...] but I could not help myself—summer was all at once there; wind, sunset over the fields of corn, and the green light of the woodland path.

So long as a man doesn't give in, he is still more than his fate.

[...] and then I thought of Pat and suddenly had the feeling that the gulf could never be bridged. The leap was too wide, life had become too dirty for happiness, it couldn't last, one didn't believe in it any more; this was only a breathing space, not a harbour.

It's only terrible to have nothing to wait for.

[...] there's nothing I can do. That's what is so damnable.

I let her be and said no more. There was no point in trying to divert her. She would have to face it, and it was as well it should happen now, while I was still there. One could only postpone it with words; sooner or later it was bound to come, and then perhaps it would only be harder.

Submit! thought I. A lot that would help. Fight, fight, was the only thing in this struggle, where one would go under in the end anyway. Fight for the little that one loved. At seventy one might begin to think about submitting.

And more even than that I felt that I was there, simply there, and that Pat was there, that I lived, that I had escaped the horror, that I had eyes and hands and thoughts and hot pulsing blood, and that all that was a miracle beyond comprehension.

It was the melancholy secret that reality can arouse desires but never satisfy them; that love begins with a human being but does not end in him; and that everything can be there: a human being, love, happiness, life—and that yet in some terrible way it is always too little, and grows ever less the more it seems.