“So this is how a person can come to despise himself-knowing he's doing the wrong thing and not being able to stop.”

“Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.”

“How do you convince someone to change, to stop being afraid of himself? How do you convince yourself not to be so scared all the time?”

“What ability there is in an individual may be measured by the yardstick of how far there is between his understanding and his will. What a person can understand he must also be able to force himself to will. Between understanding and willing is where excuses and evasions have their being.”

“Music makes me forget myself, my true condition, it carries me off into another state of being, one that isn't my own: under the influence of music I have the illusion of feeling things I don't really feel, of understanding things I don't understand, being able to do things I'm not able to do (...) Can it really be allowable for anyone who feels like it to hypnotize another person, or many other persons, and then do what he likes with them? Particularly if the hypnotist is the first unscrupulous individual who happens to come along?”

“I do not know how he even managed to do what he did. He should not have been able to, but he did. He defended my home. Me. Himself. Us.”