“But suddenly, after all this time, I feel there is something to say, and if I don'tquickly write it down, my head will burst. It doesn't matter if you read it. Itdoesn't even matter if I send it - assuming that could be done. Perhaps it comes down to this. I am writing to you because you know nothing. Because you are faraway from me and know nothing.”

“That was the trouble. The land is too big out there, and after a while it starts to swallow you up. I reached a point when I couldn't take it anymore. All that bloody silence and emptiness. You try to find your bearings in it, but it's too big, the dimensions are too monstrous, and eventually, I don't know how else to put it, eventually it just stops being there. There's no world, no land, no nothing. It comes down to that, Fogg, in the end it's all a figment. The only place you exist is in your head.”

“So it goes as I work my way down the page, and each cluster of marks is a word, and each word is a sound in my head, and each time I write another word, I hear the sound of my own voice, even though my lips are silent.”

“Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely”

“I was in the book, and the book was in my head, and as long as I stayed inside my head, I could go on writing the book. It was like living in a padded cell, but of all the lives I could have lived at that moment, it was the only one that made sense to me. I wasn't capable of being in the world, and I knew that if I tried to go back into it before I was ready, I would be crushed.”

“Here I am of the air, a beautiful thing for the light to shine on. Perhaps you will remember that. I am...”

“There was nothing to see, nothing to distract me from succumbing to my fears, and the longer I kept my eyes shut, the more terribly I saw my fears wanted me to see.”