“How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard.”

“(...) he walked away understanding, (...) how easily life can be one thing rather than another and how accidentally a destiny is made... on the other hand, how accidental fate may seem when things can never turn out other than they do.”

“No matter how much you know, no matter how much you think, no matter how much you plot and you connive and you plan, you're not superior to sex. It's a very risky game. A man wouldn't have two-thirds of the problems he has if he didn't venture off to get fucked. It's sex that disorders our normally ordered lives.”

“It's so heartbreaking, violence, when it's in a house-like seeing the clothes in a tree after an explosion. You may be prepared to see death but not the clothes in the tree.”

“Where everything is words, you'd think I'd have some mastery and know my way around, but all this churning hatred, each man a verbal firing squad, immeasurable suspicions, a flood of mocking, angry talk, all of life a vicious debate, conversations in which there is nothing that cannot be said...no, I'd be better off in the jungle, I thought, where a roar's a roar and no one is hard put to miss its meaning.”

“Dreams? If only they had been! But I don't need dreams, Doctor, that's why I hardly have them—because I have this life instead. With me it all happens in broad daylight!”

“Am I mistaken to think that even back then, in the vivid present, the fullness of life stirred our emotions to an extraordinary extent? Has anywhere since so engrossed you in its ocean of details? The detail, the immensity of the detail, the force of the detail,the weight of the detailthe rich endlessness of detail surrounding you in your young life like the six feet of dirt that’ll be packed on your grave when you’re dead”