The most terrifying thing is sometimes not what we see, but rather what we are forced to imagine.

Writers perform an extremely important role: they make others dream, those who are unable to dream for themselves. And everyone needs to dream. Could there be any more important job in life than that?

...there are so many books left to read. For that reason alone it is worth going on living. Books make me happy, the help me escape from reality.

Why had his mother gone to the trouble of bringing him into the world if the most exciting moment in his life was having been made lame by a bayonet?

He had learned from experience that what he succeeded in putting down on paper was only ever a pale reflection of what he had imagined, and so he had come to accept that this would only be half as good as the original, half as acceptable as the flawless, unachievable novel that had acted as a guide, and which he imagined pulsating mockingly behind each book like some ghostly presence.

Time is a river sweeping away all that is born towards the darkest shore.

Somehow this literary genre, which most people condemned, acted as a sort of counterbalance to Charles's soul; it was the ballast that prevented him from lurching into the serious or melancholy, unlike Andrew, who had been unable to adopt his cousin's casual attitude to life, and to whom everything seemed so achingly profound, imbed with that absurd solemnity that the transience of of existence conferred upon even the smallest act.