“I don't know how long I lay in the mud. Perhaps a minute, perhaps a day. Time was a court jester, playing tricks on me. Perhaps another lifetime. Maybe I had been reincarnated as an alligator. Or an innocent beetle feeding on my decaying flesh.”

“You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.'And how long is that going to take?'I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.'That could be a long time.'I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.”

“...you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on”

“Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don't know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.”

“Perhaps I am too tame, too domestic a magician. But how does one work up a little madness? I meet with mad people every day in the street, but I never thought before to wonder how they got mad. Perhaps I should go wandering on lonely moors and barren shores. That is always a popular place for lunatics - in novels and plays at any rate. Perhaps wild England will make me mad.”

“In these times I don't, in a manner of speaking, know what I want; perhaps I don't want what I know and want what I don't know.”