“Solitude, isolation, are painful things, and beyond human endurance.”

“Embrace your solitude and love it. Endure the pain it causes, and try to sing out with it. For those near to you are distant...”

“When the course of experience made me see that there is no saviour and no special grace, no remission beyond the human, that pain is to be endured and fades, if it fades, only with time, then God became nothing to me but a dyslexic dog, with neither bark nor bite.”

“You were merely wishing for the end of pain, the monster said. Your own pain. An end to how it isolated you. It is the most human wish of all.”

“Human beings can reach such desperate solitude that they may cross a boundary beyond which words cannot serve, and at such moments there is nothing left for them but to bark.”

“A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself; it is a child of solitude.”