“I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be”

“Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill.”

“Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.”

“Night always had been, and always would be, and night was all.”

“They walked as it were in a black vapour wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night had always been, and always would be, and night was all.”

“How would it be after the last sentence? The last sentence he had always feared and from the middle of a book, he had always been tormented by the thought that there would inevitably be a last sentence.”