“Yet, if the world were bettered byMy death or story left untold, I would condemn myself to dieFor misdemeanours manifold: I bring no harm to young or oldAlive or dead, in either case: A man so needy never rolledA mountain from its resting place.”

“I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there's nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it's coming, and then it's still coming, and then it's already over, without ever having come.”

“The last nice young man I’d met had nearly broken me. I wasn’t ready to be tied down again. And I wasn’t ready to share what was left of myself yet, either.”

“The world would be a better place for man, if man were not in it.”

“I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand why we were born.”

“We were all fated to die, and so it is good that at least we can be sure our deaths today might bring about a good end, might make the world a better place.”