“...Life is nothing but trading smells.”

“...memory can restore to life everything except smells, although nothing revives the past so completely as a smell that was once associated with it.”

“...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.”

“After that, we weren't the same anymore. We'd become men. Disillusioned and cynical. Slightly bitter too. We had nothing. We hadn't even learned a trade. No future. Nothing but life. But life without a future is worse than no life at all.”

“Maybe life is a process of trading hopes for memories.”

“...trade the life of self pity, that I was living, for a life of purpose!- Rebekah -”