“Did tragedy cause fissures, open them wider--or did tragedy merely turn on the light so you could see the fissure that had always been there?”

“There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.”

“Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.”

“the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.”

“The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.""I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.""You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.”

“We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.”