“Sure, each night we staggered home, unfired, unglazed, already broken without knowing it. But at least we were trying.”

“We were both broken, trying to become unbroken. Maybe we just needed a little help. Not to fix each other, but to help us fix ourselves.”

“I suppose we were merely on loan in each other's lives; these last years have already broken their secrets, have already gone out ahead and beyond us, reaching their conclusions: the present was beautiful in my not knowing. There are some sufferings as crimson and fallen, vibrant as autumn's tremblings.”

“Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.”

“We cannot understand without wanting to understand, that is, without wanting to let something be said...Understanding does not occur when we try to intercept what someone wants to say to us by claiming we already know it.”

“We wanted to test each other's capacity for survival: only if we had tried in vain to destroy one another would we know we were safe.”