Anything in literature, including memory, is second-hand.

What can be said about chronic hunger. Perhaps that there's a hunger that can make you sick with hunger. That it comes in addition to the hunger you already feel. That there is a hunger which is always new, which grows insatiably, which pounces on the never-ending old hunger that already took such effort to tame. How can you face the world if all you can say about yourself is that you're hungry.

Suffering doesn't improve human beings, does it?

In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear.

When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.

My flesh was burning where the skin was scraped off my knees, and I was afraid that I couldn't be alive anymore with so much pain, and at the same time I knew I was alive because it hurt. I was afraid that death would find its way into me through this open knee and I quickly covered my knee with my hands.

I wanted to get out of our thimble of a town, where every stone had eyes.