“Perhaps our eyes are merely a blank film which is taken from us after our deaths to be developed elsewhere and screened as our life story in some infernal cinema or dispatched as microfilm into the sidereal void.”

“Perhaps our age has driven us indoors.We sprawl in the semi-darkness, dreaming sometimesOf a vague world spinning in the wind.But we have snapped our locks, pulled down our shades,Taken all precautions. We shall not be disturbed.If the earth shakes, it will be on a screen;And if the prairie wind spills down our streetsAnd it covers us with leaves, the weatherman will tell us.”

“Week after week we were reduced to starting the same letter over again and copying out the same appeals, so that after a certain time words which had at first been torn bleeding from our hearts became void of sense. We copied them down mechanically, trying by means of these dead words to give some idea of our ordeal. And in the end, the conventional call of a telegram seemed to us preferable to this sterile, obstinate monologue and this arid conversation with a blank wall.”

“I write because the lives of all of us are stories. If enough of those stories are told, then perhaps we will begin to see that our lives are the same story. The differences are merely in the details.”

“Every story is a story about death. But perhaps, if we are lucky, our story about death is also a story about love.”

“Feebleness of will brings about weakness of head, and the abyss, in spite of its horror, comes to fascinate us, as though it were a place of refuge. Terrible danger! For this abyss is within us; this gulf, open like the vast jaws of an infernal serpent bent on devouring us, is in the depth of our own being, and our liberty floats over this void, which is always seeking to swallow it up.”