“If there was one thing I had never been, it was mysterious, and if there was one thing I had never done, it was not talk.”

“It is, perhaps, a better thing to be valued only as an object of passion than never to be valued at all. I had never been so absolutely the mysterious other. I had become a kind of phoenix, a fabulous beast; I was an outlandish jewel.”

“It had not been all suffering and horror. Life is never only one thing.”

“I had been right, I was still right, I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well have lived it another. I had done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done this thing but I had done another. And so?”

“Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended. ”

“It's because it makes no difference to her at all whether I speak or not; as if I didn't exist and never had existed... the thing more inconceivable than one's death--never to have been born...”