“I foresee the day when we shall read nothing but telegrams and prayers.”

“What right have you to pray for me? I need no intercessor, I shall manage alone. The prayers of a wretch I might accept, but no one else’s, not even a saint’s. I cannot bear your bothering about my salvation. If I apprehend salvation and flee it, your prayers are merely an indiscretion. Invest them elsewhere; in any case, we do not serve the same gods. If mine are impotent, there is every reason to believe yours are no less so. Even assuming they are as you imagine them, they would still lack the power to cure me of a horror older than my memory.”

“We have lost, being born, as much as we shall lose dying: Everything!”

“We have convictions only if we have studied nothing thoroughly.”

“By all evidence we are in the world to do nothing.”

“Read day and night, devour books—these sleeping pills—not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

“The dead center of existence: when it is all the same to you whether you read a newspaper article or think about God.”