“The past lies beneath the surface, intransigent truth. Remembered or not, what we say and do remains, always.”

“A man says something. Sometimes it turns out to be the truth, but this has nothing to do with the man who says it. What we say occupies a very thin surface, like the skin over a body of water. Beneath this, through the water itself, is what we see, sometimes clearly if the water is calm, sometimes vaguely if the water is troubled, and we imagine this vision to be the truth, clear or vague. But beneath this is yet another level. This is the level of what is and this level has nothing to do with what we say or what we see.”

“We may seem fine, even when the pain remains right there beneath our surface.”

“The lie is the future, one may venture to say [...]. To tell the truth is, on the contrary, to say what is or what will have been and it would instead prefer the past.”

“The truth may be stretched thin, but it never breaks, and it always surfaces above lies, as oil floats on water.”

“Eli had learned long ago that you can stare right at something and not see what lies beneath the surface.”