“...Who is that witch, asked the old man with the black eyepatch, these are things we say when we do not know how to take a good look at ourselves, had he lived as she had lived, we should like to see how long his civilised ways would last.”

“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.”

“...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.”

“don't ask me what good and what evil are, we knewwhat it was each time we had to act when blindness was an ex-ception, what is right and what is wrong are simply differentways of understanding our relationships with the others, not thatwhich we have with ourselves, one should not trust the latter”

“When we are born, when we enter this world, it is as if we signed a pact for the rest of our life, but a day may come when we will ask ourselves Who signed this on my behalf?”

“...you have to leave the island in order to see the island, that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing.”

“Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.”