“Your wife has deserted you, but you’ll find a new one; whereas, soon my wits will desert me, and for this there is no remedy.”

“The clock ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert. The black bars on the clock face are green oases. The long hand has marched ahead to find water. The other, painfully stumbles among hot stones in the desert. It will die in the desert.”

“So you find yourself surrounded by death and horror in the world, and you escape it into lust. But lust has no duration; it leaves you again in the desert.”

“It would be very unjust to say that you deserted me, but that I was deserted, and sometimes terribly so, is true.”

“Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.”

“No doubt you are wondering what you will find, out there.' The Commandant said it for me.'Well, it would be useless for me to try and tell you. The desert tells a different story every time one ventures on it...”