“Curse him to eternal damnation! Yes! Of course!" came the emotional reply."Don't curse him," I said softly. "Remember--he's only a machine, just an imperfect mirror of ourselves. We made him what he is--the disease, the cancer."There was nothing else to say, because that left only cursing ourselves, and we were already cursed.”

“You said a curse is only a curse if I allowed myself to me cursed by it. You said... I had it in my power to free myself of any curse - that curses were preludes to blessings...”

“We came to the end, we found nothing. Nothing!!! And we cursed because we were hoping for so much less.”

“Augustin stood there looking down at him and cursed him speaking slowly clearly bitterly and contemptuously and cursing as steadily as though he were dumping manure on a field lifting it with a dung fork out of a wagon.”

“I seem at once cursed to say precisely what I'm thinking to him and unable to tell what he thinks about it.”

“On some evenings it would sadden Jacques to look at them (workers). Until then he had only known the riches and the joys of poveryy. But now heat and boredom and fatigue were showing him their curse, the curse of work so stupid you could weep and so interminably monotonous that it made the days too long and, at the same time, life too short.”