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

“To live only to suffer—only to feel the injury of life repeated and enlarged—it seemed to her she was too valuable, too capable, for that. Then she wondered if it were vain and stupid to think so well of herself. When had it even been a guarantee to be valuable? Wasn't all history full of the destruction of precious things? Wasn't it much more probable that if one were fine one would suffer?”

“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.”

“…my life has been a remarkable one. Maybe one day someone will write a book about me . . .” "I’ve never much cared for horror stories.”

“The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)”

“If life were fair, we would never have suffered what we suffered at all; having suffered it and survived, we're still reacting to things that don't exist anymore.”