“In such a beast as this..." (he means the army)"...it was the collective power that went, collapsing like a long-exhausted animal, at once falling under its own weight as much as that of its enemy. It was a collective death and not a matter of bravery or even strength, and once it was down it was finished as a battle.”

“Overgrown, crumbling, tilted, full of cracks, returning to the soil. Paint fell from boards, plaster from walls. Unsupervised, matter was collapsing under its own weight.”

“The struggle is lost from the beginning, long before the victorious party or army conquers state power and ‘betrays’ its promises. It is lost once power itself seeps into the struggle, once the logic of power becomes the logic of the revolutionary process, once the negative of refusal is converted into the positive of power-building.”

“I don’t collect awards, I collect empty trophy cases. Once my collection is large enough, I’m going to start collecting broken dreams.”

“To fall in the void as I fell: none of you knows what that means… I went down into the void, to the most absolute bottom conceivable, and once there I saw that the extreme limit must have been much, much farther below, very remote, and I went on falling, to reach it.”

“I got through so much ink in the learning that the inkseller took to knocking at least once a week on the garden door. He had a gray solemn face that looked as if it was chiseled out of stone; he was stooped down like the letter C, as if he were Atlas carrying the weight of the world in his wooden barrel of ink. Maybe he did. I have learned that there is great power in words, no matter how long or short they be.”