“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.”

“I’ve been grasping at nothing, running in circles, trying desperately to fill the emptiness inside with nothing but air. If I think about it too much, I feel shame, so much shame. So I don’t.”

“We're even more dazed than usual. Here we sit, empty, bewildered, contented. We have nothing to talk about, because nothing happens to us anymore, we're too poor, maybe life is sick of us. Why not?”

“Maybe his heart is searching for and not finding the place it used to live. I understand that because mine is searching and not finding too.”

“Scar tissue, she'd once read, was the strongest of all tissues. Maybe Soren's heart was so strong because it was so scarred.”

“There are certain things in a man's past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind. I can put it even this way: the more decent a man is, the larger will the number of such things be.”