“A language is everything you do.”

“War is what happens when language fails.”

“Touch comes before sight, before speech. It is the first language and the last, and it always tells the truth.”

“You can’t buy it, but it has a price,” said Oryx. “Everything has a price.”

“When you're young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You're your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don't yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you've been.”

“I wonder which is preferable, to walk around all your life swollen up with your own secrets until you burst from the pressure of them, or to have them sucked out of you, every paragraph, every sentence, every word of them, so at the end you're depleted of all that was once as precious to you as hoarded gold, as close to you as your skin - everything that was of the deepest importance to you, everything that made you cringe and wish to conceal, everything that belonged to you alone - and must spend the rest of your days like an empty sack flapping in the wind, an empty sack branded with a bright fluorescent label so that everyone will know what sort of secrets used to be inside you?”

“And then everything went on very quietly for a fortnight, says Dr. Jordan. He is reading aloud from my confession.Yes Sir, it did, I say. More or less quietly.What is everything? How did it go on?I beg your pardon, Sir?What did you do everyday?Oh, the usual, Sir, I say. I performed my duties.You will forgive me, says Dr. Jordan. Of what did those duties consist?I look at him. He is wearing a yellow cravat with small white squares, he is not making a joke. He really does not know. Men such as him do not have to clean up the messes they make, but we have to clean up our own messes, and theirs into the bargain. In that way they are like children, they do not have to think ahead, or worry about the consequences of what they do. But it's not their fault, it is only how they are brought up.”