- Amadeu: We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place. We stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. We travel to ourselves when we go to a place. Now we have covered the stretch of our lives, no matter how brief it may have been.
- Amadeu: But by travelling to ourselves we must confront our own loneliness. And isn't it so everything we do is done out of fear of loneliness? Isn't that why we renounce all the things we will regret at the end of our lives?
- Amadeu: A decisive moment of life, when its direction changes forever, are not always marked by large and shown dramatics. In truth, the dramatic moments of a life determining experience are often unbelievable, low key. When it unfolds its revolutionary effects and insures that life is revealed in a brand new light, it does that silently. And in this wonderful silence resides its special nobility.
- Raimund Gregorius: We threw a party for our colleagues... our friends. And she found this quote, from Pessoa: "The fields are greener in their description, than in their actual greenness." And somebody said: "Oh, that'a beautiful sentence" and I said: "Yes, but only a few people will ever understand it". And there was this terrible silence. And then she said, my wife: "And I suppose you are one of the chosen few?".
- Amadeu: What could... what should be done, with all the time that lies ahead of us? Open and unshaped, feather-light in its freedom and lead-heavy in its uncertainty? Is it a wish, dreamlike and nostalgic, to stand once again at that point in life, and be able to take a completely different direction to the one which has made us who we are?
- Raimund Gregorius: Look at these eyes. Tell me what they reveal.
- Mariana: They melancholic, but hopeful; tired, but persistent... contradictory.
- Raimund Gregorius: [to his opponent, after making a move in a chess game he is playing against himself] That'll get you thinking...
- Adriana de Prado: I believe you are looking for my brother.
- Raimund Gregorius: Yes. Is the doctor in?
- Adriana de Prado: Are you ill?
- Raimund Gregorius: No. I'm... I'm reading this book. I'd very much like to meet him. What he writes touches me very deeply.
- Raimund Gregorius: [narrating] Is it ultimately a question of self-image, the determining idea one has made for oneself of what one has to have accomplished and experienced, so that one can approve of the life one has lived?
- Raimund Gregorius: If this is the case, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one planned to be.
- Raimund Gregorius: If the certainty befalls us that it will never be achieved, this wholeness.. we suddenly don't know how to live the time that can no longer be part of a whole life.