“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 . . .”

“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.”

“The only animal from which humans have nothing to learn, in fact, is the sheep. Humans have already learned everything the sheep's got to teach.”

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

“He'd seen her not really recognising him, not really, when it came down to it, caring who he was. It was disgusting, that pain could do that. What was the point of it, except to shame and disgust everyone? To make a mockery of love? If that was God then fuck God, whether there was a reason for it or not. If there was a reason then fuck the reason. No kind of reason he was interested in any more.”

“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.”