“Some mysteries are simply irresistible,” she said. “They have components that alter a life.”

“We walked to meet each other up at the time of our love and then we have been irresistibly drifting in different directions, and there's no altering that.”

“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”

“A life, a history, whole patterns of existence altered, simply by doing nothing. The silent lie. The act of omission.”

“In the past we have tried to make a distinction between animals which we acknowledge have some value and other which, having none, can be liquidated when we wish. This standard must be abandoned. Everything that lives has value simply as a living thing, as one of the manifestations of the mystery that is life.”

“I can’t reveal the mystery to either saint or sinner; I can’t state at length what I’ve said curtly; I achieve an altered state that I can’t explain; I have a secret that I cannot share.”