“Overpowered by the sadness of not knowing what there is in the world, and what I'm doing. Feeling completely indifferent to good and evil too, to beauty or anything else. I know that this is the root of all human troubles, all of them. Indifferent to that knowledge, too. Nothing got written.”

“You know, all the evil in the world, all the sadness comes from not having a good answer to that question: What do I do next? You just keep thinking of good things to do, lad. You'll be all right. We'll all be all right. I wanted you to know that.”

“What blurt is this about virtue and about vice?Evil propels me and reform of evil propels me, I stand indifferent,My gait is no fault-finder's or rejecter's gait,I moisten the roots of all that has grown.”

“Feelings and togetherness might cause hatred but indifference doesn't even know what feelings are.”

“It isn't dying I'm afraid of, it isn't that at all; I know what it is to die, I've died already. It is the endless obliteration, the knowledge that there will never be anything else. That's what I can't stand, to try so hard and to end in nothing. You know what I mean, don't you? ... I really loved to write.”

“Why I love him is, I don't know, because he seems very brave and kind and sweet. All that stuff but something else, too. I don't know what something else, but he's different somehow, and what I'm trying to say is it's a good kind of difference, whatever it is.”