“But I was not quite with him in my thoughts, and I wonder whether that is how we got to be after living alone for a long time, that in the middle of a train of thought we start talking outloud, that the difference between talking and not talking is slowly wiped out, that the unending, inner conversations we carry on with ourselves merges with the one we have with the few people we still see, and when you live alone for too long the line which divides the one form the other becomes vague, and you do not notice when you cross that line. Is this how my future looks?”

“How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means - the setting up of our lines?”

“How can you prove whether at this moment we are sleeping, and all our thoughts are a dream; or whether we are awake, and talking to one another in the waking state? ”

“What will the last syllable of recorded time be, and who will be the one to write it? No matter how long we live, we still wonder when our world will end and how.”

“When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other.”

“How quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound.”