“And happiness...Well, after all, desires torment us, don't they? And, clearly, happiness is when there are no more desires, not one...What a mistake, what ridiculous prejudice it's been to have marked happiness always with a plus sign. Absolute happiness should, of course, carry a minus sign — the divine minus.”

“I ask you: what have people – from the very cradle- prayed for dreamed about and agonized over They wanted someone anyone to tell them once and for all what happiness is – and then to attach them to this happiness with a chain…”

“It's clear: if there is no good reason for enviousness, the denominator of the fraction of happiness is brought to zero and the fraction is transformed into a glorious infinity.”

“I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is nothing except my "soul," like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that...”

“Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.”

“Happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative.”

“...Those two, in paradise, were given a choice: happiness without freedom, or freedom without happiness. There was no third alternative...”