Self-expression is a hard and selfish thing. It eats everything, even the self. At the end you find you haven't even got a self to express.

Hope was an instinct only the reasoning human mind could kill. An animal never knew despair.

They can print statistics and count the populations in hundreds of thousands, but to each man a city consists of no more than a few streets, a few houses, a few people. Remove those few and a city exists no longer except as a pain in the memory, like a pain of an amputated leg no longer there.

Life would go out in a 'fraction of a second' (that was the phrase), but all night he had been realizing that time depends on clocks and the passage of light. There were no clocks and the light wouldn't change. Nobody really knew how long a second of pain could be. It might last a whole purgatory--or for ever.

The world was in her heart already, like the small spot of decay in a fruit.

What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment?

Indifference and pride look very much alike, and he probably thought I was proud.