“Sometimes to take two steps in a row, one after the other, I need to make a contract with myself.”

“Do you really know yourself so well or are you making it up?' she asks. Some things I concoct, some I glean from my senses, most I thirst for.”

“I can hardly keep track of the things I don't know, but every now and then comes an ignorance that makes me nostalgic.”

“I grow fond of David, who lays a single stone before Goliath and a single book, the Psalms, in the mouth of the world.”

“A man dies and his skin loses heat like the sand on a summer evening. It makes you feel like warming him up.”

“You stay in the war because it would be shameful to stay out of it. An then grief seizes you and hold its grip till anger has turned you into a soldier.”

“I do not snivel that snivel the world over,That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.”

“I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness-...”

“Life is such unutterable hell, solely because it is sometimes beautiful. If we could only be miserable all the time, if there could be no such things as love or beauty or faith or hope, if I could ...”

“You have to understand something about girls, Mick. You see 'em in the winner's circle, but you'll never find horseshit on their shoes.”

“People needed proof that Utopia was nothing more than a theory, an illusion read in fictional stories.”

“It keeps him happy, Dahlaine, and happy people are nicer than gloomy ones. Haven't you noticed that before?”

“Sometimes a gloomy street is all a sad person needs! A magical relief may arise from the meeting of the two sad things!”

“At that time I was only twenty-four years old. My life then was already gloomy, disorderly, and solitary to the point of savagery.”