“Like the culture that created me, I am receding into the past at a rate of knots. Soon I'll need a whole row of footnotes if anybody under thirty-five is going to comprehend the least thing I say.”

“I toppled off my pyrotechnic tiger and, as I plunge downwards, endlessly as Lucifer, I ask myself: "What is the most miraculous event in the world?" And I answer myself: "I am going to fall into my own arms. They stretch out to me from the bottom of the pit.”

“all white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be seen or touched”

“Outside the window, there slides past that unimaginable and deserted vastness where night is coming on, the sun declining in ghastly blood-streaked splendour like a public execution across, it would seem, half a continent, where live only bears and shooting stars and the wolves who lap congealing ice from water that holds within it the entire sky. All white with snow as if under dustsheets, as if laid away eternally as soon as brought back from the shop, never to be used or touched. Horrors! And, as on a cyclorama, this unnatural spectacle rolls past at twenty-odd miles an hour in a tidy frame of lace curtains only a little the worse for soot and drapes of a heavy velvet of dark, dusty blue.”

“So I suppose I do not know how he really looked, and, in fact, I suppose I shall never know, now, for he was plainly an object created in the mode of fantasy. His image was already present somewhere in my head and I was seeking to discover it in actuality, looking at every face I met in case it was the right face - that is, the face which corresponded to my notion of the unseen face of the one I should love, a face created parthenogeneticallyby the rage to love which consumed me.”

“I am entirely alone. I and my shadow fill the universe.”

“I should have liked to have had him beside me in a glass coffin, so that I could watch him all the time and he would not have been able to get away from me.”