“Once you've seen a solution to the disease that's tearing you apart, relapsing is never fun.”

“Once you've been backstage at a theater, the theater is never the same for you. Once you've noticed the crack in the vase, the vase is never the same for. Once you've seen a friend do something appalling, the friendship is never the same. That does not mean you won't go to the theater, or keep the vase or the friend. You can choose.”

“<3. You think that looks like a heart? If you do, that's only because you've never seen scrotum.”

“Oh, that's typical of you modern young men; you've nibbled at science and it's made you ill, because you've not been able to satisfy that old craving for the absolute that you absorbed in your nurseries. You'd like science to give you all the answers at one go, whereas we're only just beginning to understand it, and it'll probably never be anything but an eternal quest. And so you repudiate science, you fall back on religion, and religion won't have you any more. Then you relapse into pessimism...Yes, it's the disease of our age, of the end of the century: you're all inverted Werthers.”

“Books are like a disease. Once you've got it, it's incurrable and lifelong”

“But you can't unsee something once you've seen it. Not without a memory wipe anyway.”