“To be a joke, it was too cruel;But to be true, it was absurd…My mind seemed to have got the fuelIt needed to become alert.”

“The most insane things can become normal if you have them around you long enough. A mind can’t seem to hold anything too crazy for too long without finding a way to make it seem normal.”

“It was too exactly as imagined to be true. But I felt as gladly and expectantly disorientated, as happily and alertly alone, as Alice in Wonderland.”

“There were jokes under fascism and the Nazis too, but those systems did not create an absurd, laugh-a-minute reality like communism.”

“There was a great joke that was forever doing the rounds in the jail and it was probably funny not because it had a humorous punchline but because it was so very true at a deep psychological level. Put anyone in that jail and soon enough they'd actually become a cruel, twisted, sadistic and heartless thug. And some of the prisoners were just as bad.”

“She probably thought I was making a dumb joke, but sometimes history sounded like a dumb joke. History was either a dumb joke or a cruel joke.”