“Expect nothing and you don't need the courage to hope, nor the strength to withstand disappointment when nothing comes.”

“Pain is beyond reason, an obliterating giant stupidity to which all your history of jokes and nuance and ideas and caresses is nothing, simply nothing . . .”

“Nothing apparently, disturbed the mans air of having his mind on something more important than you. You wanted to slap him.”

“Darkness now is pure phenomenon, nothing to do with him. This is the final relationship with the universe: you find solace only in things that offer none.”

“I waited. Nothing. Here again was the colossal silence where God's, someone's, anyone's voice should have been. Learn this lesson now, my brother said, I shan't teach it twice. There is nothing. It means nothing. Then the night exhaled and flowed again. I knew with clairvoyant weariness I'd go back countless times to the question of why, how, but knew too I carried the answer inside. It had gone in like an inhaled spec of toxic dust. Life is nothing but a statement of what happens to be.”

“Nothing holds love together like shared vice or collusive perversion.”

“Naturally torturers giggle while they work: The body’s dumb obedience to physics (pull hard enough and this comes off, squeeze tight enough and that pops out) against which the nuances of the victim’s personality count for nothing has in it one of the roots of comedy—the spirit’s subservience to the flesh. You can cut a head off and shove it in a bag, stick it on a pole, play volleyball or footie with it. Hilarious, among other things.”