“But how could he explain anything to them, when they understood good but not goodness, strong but not strength, black but not blackness? Give us bread! the Savages cried. Heal us!They were frightened by the consecrated wine, believing that the Black-Gowns drank human blood. This is the blood of JESUS, said Pere Masse. Was that a man? they asked.He was the SON OF GOD, but He became a man to die for us. In memory of his sacrifice, we drink His blood. At this they drew back and whispered in their language, with many terrified glances. ”

“So then, in a pleading tone, he whispers: Why did you make me? I never wanted to be made… For propaganda, of course. It’s all in your own book. How can we persuade others to be good, without evil we can point to?”

“As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don’t you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth’ his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything.”

“This book was written by a traitor to his class. It is dedicated to bigots everywhere. Ladies and gentlemen of the black shirts, I call upon you to unite, to strike with claws and kitchen pokers, to burn the grub-worms of equality’s brood with sulfur and oil, to huddle together whispering about the silverfish in your basements, to make decrees in your great solemn rotten assemblies concerning what is proper, for you have nothing to lose but your last feeble principles.”

“I do most sincerely believe that ethical behavior as we best construe it ought to be followed by us throughout our lives, even on the last day of life, and that if we have made a bad or even evil choice we are not barred (or excused) thereby from continuing to live the last moments or years given to us in whatever way we consider to be most right.”

“Well let the gentlemen of the bourgeoisie remember Berlin any way they please. As Comrade Khruschev promised us, we will bury them.”

“But, as I have said, the bugs had no interest in getting us…and no great curiosity or enthusiasm about us as such; from the cowardly cockroaches to the blind stolid ants they wanted only to be left alone to eat and breed and eat and breed, just like us.”