“Yet even if I manage that, one single slip, and a slip cannot be avoided, will stop the whole process, easy and painful alike, and I will have to shrink back into my own circle again.”

“One has just been sent out as a biblical dove, has found nothing green, and slips back into the darkness of the Ark”

“I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself.”

“My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.”

“I can prove at any time that my education tried to make another person out of me than the one I became. It is for the harm, therefore, that my educators could have done me in accordance with their intentions that I reproach them; I demand from their hands the person I now am, and since they cannot give him to me, I make of my reproach and laughter a drumbeat sounding in the world beyond.”

“My peers, lately, have found companionship through means of intoxication--it makes them sociable. I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness--it is all that I have--and when the drugs and alcohol dissipate, will be all that my peers have as well.”

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could avoid.”