“One has to kill a few of one’s natural selves to let the rest grow — a very painful slaughter of innocents.”

“[…] nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favour of the present, so that one’s embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one’s home.”

“One learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence.”

“The choice I mean is to protect our own innocents from the seraphim, instead of slaughtering theirs.""There are no innocent seraphim, said the wolf.""That's what they say when they kill our children.”

“There are very few innocent sentences in writing.”

“The last few hours were certainly very painful," replied Anne: "but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-”