“The discrepancy between the modern observance and the prescriptions of the Rule had struck me ever since the novitiate, and no satisfactory explanation had ever been given to me. People said that man had changed: the weakness of people's health no longer allows us to fast. Was it true?”

“I couldn't forget. I couldn't break. She had the power to break me. No one had ever been given that power, ever.”

“...But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true - that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place...and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”

“Despite what I said before, it had not been a fear of infecting other people or poor health that had stopped me from going, but vanity. It was a good lesson.”

“How could I ever forget my best friend, the man, who had changed my destiny simply by allowing me to write about him?”

“No one could ever be for me what [he] had been because he had known me when, and that had kept me away from the true reality of my years.”