“Work — once merely an annoying nuisance — has become an agonizing torture.”

“Marriage becomes hard work once you have poured the entirety of your life’s expectations for happiness into the hands of one mere person. Keeping that going is hard work.”

“What an absurd torture for the artist to know that an audience identifies him with a work that, within himself, he has moved beyond and that was merely a game played with something in which he does not believe.”

“A human being must have occupation if he or she is not to become a nuisance to the world. ”

“Children are resilient,” Anise said, simultaneously agreeing with her friend and cutting her off. “But often their wounds simply remain invisible until, all at once, whatever is festering there becomes agonizingly apparent.”

“Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.”