“What's going on? A soul? Did you say, a soul? What the hell! Next thing you know we'll have cholera again. What did I tell you? [He tossed the thin one on his horns.] I told you so... we should operate on all of them, on the imagination. Extirpate the imagination. Surgery's the only answer... nothing but surgery...”

“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…”

“Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo... No, that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believe it completely, believe not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy...?”

“...And what if you don't wait? You just drive over the edge yourself? Wouldn't that be the only right thing to do, the one that would solve everything?”

“You know... or maybe you don't know... I don't know how to write this-but never mind: Now you know that there will never be a day for me, or a morning, or a springtime, without you. Because for me R is nothing more than... but you don't care about this. At any rate, I'm very grateful to him. I don't know what I would have done, alone, without him, these last few days. During these days and nights I've lived through ten or maybe twenty years. My room has seemed round and not square, and endless, round and round and all the same, with no doors anywhere. I can't live without you-because I love you. because I see. I understand, that you don't need anybody, anybody on earth, except her, that other one, and... look, that's just it, if I love you, then I have to...I just need two or three more days to try and put the pieces of myself back into some semblance of the former O-90-and then I'll go and fill our the form myself, that I'm withdrawing my registration for you, and you'll be better off, you'll be fine. I'll never come again. Goodbye.O.”

“Now... what I feel these in my brain is just like... some kind of foreign body... like having a very thin little eyelash in your eye. You feel generally okay, but that eye with the last in it-you can't get it off your mind for a second.”

“You don't look normal, dear. You look sick. Because sick and not normal are the same thing. You're destroying yourself, and no one is going to tell you that - no one.”