“in order to invent heaven and hell a man would need to know nothing except the human body”

“There are such moments in life, when, in order for heaven to open, it is necessary for a door to close.”

“The objectivity of the narrator is a modern invention, we need only reflect that our Lord God didn’t want it in his book.”

“Words were not given to man in order to conceal his thoughts”

“There is nothing as sad, nothing as unutterably sad, as an old man crying.”

“...for human words are like shadows, and shadows are incapable of explaining light and between shadow and light there is the opaque body from which words are born..”

“The first blind man had begun by declaring that his wife would not be subjected to the shame of giving her body to strangers in exchange for whatever, she had no desire to do so nor would he permit it, for dignity has no price, that when someone starts making small concessions, in the end live loses all meaning. The doctor then asked him what meaning he saw in the situation in which all of them there found themselves, starving, covered in filth up to their ears, ridden with lice, eaten by bedbugs, bitten by fleas, I, too, would prefer my wife not to go, but what I want serves no purpose, ... I know that my manly pride, this thing we call male pride, if after so many humiliations, we still preserve something worthy of that name, I know that it will suffer, it already is, I cannot avoid it, but it is probably the only solution, if we want to live.”