“What a thing it is to live in New York City. To move here and not know a soul. A clean slate, a chance to walk away from the past and start anew...I will feign coolness. I will slowly learn the art of not showing that I am surprised or impressed or moved. I will feel the elation that comes from anonymity. I will feel the comfortable loneliness of wandering the avenues in the rush of humanity, the side streets by myself.”

“Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream.”

“I knew I couldn't live in America and I wasn't ready to move to Europe so I moved to an island off the coast of America - New York City .”

“Tomorrow I too - this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself - yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks the streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?' And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.”

“When I lived here and woke up from the fog in my head, I would walk by myself to the grave site set aside for me, so that I could feel comfortable if I lived there after death.”

“Well, what, what new thing can they say to me that I don't know myself? And is that the point? The point here is that--one turn of the wheel, and everything changes, and these same moralizers will be the first (I'm sure of it) to come with friendly jokes to congratulate me. And they won't all turn away from me as they do now. Spit on them all! What am I now? Zéro. What may I be tomorrow? Tomorrow I may rise from the dead and begin to live anew! I may find the man in me before he's lost!”