(page 77) "He wanted to tell her that he liked studying because you can do it alone, because all the things you study are already dead, cold, and chewed over. he wanted to talle her that the pages of the schoolbooks were all the same temperature, that they left you time to choose, that they never hurt you and you couldn't hurt them either. But he said nothing."

(page 99) "Mattia was right: they days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tatoo, and from both their memeories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.

For Alice and Mattia, the high school years were an open wound that had seemed so deep that it could never heal. They had passed through them without breathing, he rejecting the world and she feeling rejected by it, and eventually they had noticed that it didn't make all that much difference. The had formed a defective and asymmertrical friendship, made up of long absences and much silence, a clean and empty space where both could come back to breathe when the walls of their school became too close for them to ignore the feeling of suffocation.

But over time, the wound of adolescence gradully healed. The edges of skin met in imperceptible but continuous movements. The scab peeled off with each fresh abrasion, but then stubbornly reformed, darker and thicker. Finally a new layer of skin, smooth and elastic, had replaced the missing one. The scar slowly turned from red to white, and ended up merging with all the others."

(page 111) "Prime numbers are dividsible only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their plcae in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed, like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they'd been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other tiems he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinarry numbers, but for some reason they couldn't do it. this second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.

In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians called them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. if you have the patience to go counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. you encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers, and you develop a distressing presentiment that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you'are about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tighterly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered.

Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other. He had never told her that. when he imagined confessing these things to here, the thin layer of sweat on his hands evaporated completely and for a good ten minutes he was no longer capable of touching anything."

(page 184) (phone call between Mattia and his father)"They had already run out of things to say, but they lingered for a few seconds, the receivers pressed to their ears. They both breathed in a llittle of the affection that still survivied between them, diluted along hundreds of miles of coaxial cables and nourished by something whose name they didn't know and which perhaps, if they thought too carefully about it, no longer existed."