“They could not understand the advantage of living contrary to their inclinations in this world in order to enjoy a hypothetical well-being in another. ”

“Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of madness?”

“He wanted nothing, for the time being, except to understand .... Without advice, assistance or plan, he began reading an incongruous assortment of books; he would find some passage which he could not understand in one book, and he would get another on that subject .... There was no order in his reading; but there was order in what remained of it in his mind.”

“To love in the sense of passion-love is the contrary of to live. It is an impoverishment of one's being, an askesis without sequel, an inability to enjoy the present without imagining it as absent, a never-ending flight from possession.”

“In order to survive, we cling to all we know and understand. And label it reality. But knowledge and understanding are ambiguous. That reality could be an illusion. All humans live with the wrong assumptions. Isn't that another way of looking at it? That sharingan how much can you really se?”

“But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.”