All of them had a restlessness in common.

The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.

I could not help it: the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes.

'The fact is,' I said, 'that you're unable, or unwilling, to believe in the fact that I believe in you.'

You know, when someone hurts my feelings, somehow it does not comfort me to know that it was deliberate... On the other hand, knowing that someone else thinks they are assholes helps a great deal."
"I think that's some kind of rule for the universe.

...I have never cared for any men as much as for these who felt the first springs when I did, and saw death ahead, and were reprieved - and who now walk the long stormy summer. It is a generation staunch by inheritance, sophisticated by fact - and rather deeply wise. More than that, what I feel about them is summed up in a line of Willa Cather's: "We possess together the precious, the incommunicable past.