“There is probably nothing harder than seeming sincere when your heart is broken. And sincerity, as problematic as the word may appear to you, is also the basis of teaching. You can't pretend for long.”

“Not only had fear been banished from the establishment, not even a remarkable event was able to upset the balance of our little world. That was the absolute proof of our invincibility. We had become so used to living without the unexpected. The moment a dangerous breech opened up in the walls of our world, we turned in on ourselves without ever losing our sense of solidarity as a group, the better to rethink the 'incident'. Only by stripping it of its drama were we able to forget it in the short term, and restore a sense of continuity. Each of us returned to his own task, swathed in that very particular corporate radiation that immunised us against reality. For us teachers, it seemed that the only way of surviving was to rein in our own perspectives as far as possible, day after day, to live as close as we could to our centres.”

“For an artist, there's nothing better than having the opportunity to create a world that doesn't- but could- exist.”

“I heard a song that nailed it: "And if the day came when I felt a natural emotion / I'd get such a shock I'd probably lie / in the middle of the street and die." When were these so-called natural emotions and why were they worth more than the others? Hadn't I already begun to suspect that with feelings, as with revolutions, the more spontaneous-seeming were actually the outcome of long and involved tactical maneuvers? And if, unfortunately, you had to make do without being 'natural', wasn't it better to act as consciously, as deliberately, and therefore as forcefully as possible? Just because a feeling had been painstakingly pieced together didn't mean it was worthless, nor was it necessarily shallow...”

“Here, too, I recognized-easily, from firsthand experience, since this kind of thing happened at my age-the heat of the moment, the very instant you knew you should be feeling something but, for various reasons, partly due to inexperience, partly to a desynchronized, muddled teenage constitution, this emotion, however hard you tried to express it, stayed uncomfortably stuck in your heart, only half there and only half felt, just like my love for that girl across the street, the feeling I was trying to coax out of myself the way you might squeeze a toothpaste tube you'd decided to roll from the bottom up but that, distracted, and in a rush, you finally ended up pressing any which way.”

“Clusters of distant lights was the view of Mankind that he liked the best. The lights had the archaic charm of little fires on a plain, and the frailty about them, if it did not excuse anything, at least explained a lot of Man's stubborn ruthlessness. Mankind had not started the mess that was life, after all. And on the whole, it had been an interesting species to be a part of, the girls especially, as long as you remembered to watch your back.”

“Don't we all discover, at some stage or another that there are some things we'll never get any better at, even though we have no idea why and hardly ever notice it when it happens, even though we may have enjoyed these things and might not have been lagging behind last time we checked? Learning to draw, for instance, was a familiar catastrophe - all of a sudden, unaware, you just stop getting any better at it, your drawings never progress beyond those of a four-year-old or a six-year-old, you're left behind by those who "can draw," condemned to producing flat, doughy figures on the page, with no sense of perspective to them and (this was what really struck me) no resemblance to the outside world: condemned by your ruined self to a shameful childhood.”