“They move about listlessly and apparently without much purpose; they might just as well be lunatics.”

“What I really hoped for, no doubt, was to come upon one of those lives which begin nowhere, which lead us through marshes and salt flats, trickling away, seemingly without plan, purpose or goal, and suddenly emerge, gushing like geysers, and never cease gushing, even in death.”

“I was alive. But I was alive without a memory, without a name; I was cut off from hope as well as from remorse or regret. I had no past and would probably have no future; I was buried alive in a void which was the wound that had been dealt me. I was like the wound itself.”

“I wandered aimlessly through this muddy lane bespattered with blood, fragments of the past detached themselves and floated listlessly before my eyes, taunting me with the direst forebodings [...] My world of human beings had perished; I was utterly alone in the world and for friends I had the streets, and the streets spoke to me in that sad, bitter language compounded of human misery, yearning, regret, failure, wasted effort”

“I am of the order whose purpose is not to teach the world a lesson but to explain that school is over.”

“There is nothing strange about fear: no matter in what guise it presents itself it is something with which we are all so familiar that when a man appears who is without it we are at once enslaved by him.”

“That’s the first thing that strikes anAmerican woman about Europe – that it’s unsanitary. Impossible forthem to conceive of a paradise without modern plumbing. If theyfind a bedbug they want to write a letter immediately to thechamber of commerce.”