“The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.”

“Why should we remain innocent of what lurks in the shadows? How can we live in the world if we don't understand how dark and brutal it can be?”

“And in the years when your shadow leaned clear across the land as you lay abed nights with your heartbeat mounting to the billions, his invention must let a man drowse easy in the falling leaves like the boys in autumn who, comfortably strewn in the dry stacks, are content to be a part of the death of the world...”

“I go back to the reading room, where I sink down in the sofa and into the world of The Arabian Nights. Slowly, like a movie fadeout, the real world evaporates. I'm alone, inside the world of the story. My favourite feeling in the world.”

“Everything else is mere shadows in a world of your realness.”

“To remain unknown in this modern world: that, indeed, is real power.”