There seemed nothing to do but live.

If there were a better, clearer, shorter way of saying what the fiction says, then why not scrap the fiction?

Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?

State censorship presents itself as a bulwark between society and forces of subversion or moral corruption. To dismiss this account of its own motives by the state as insincere would be a mistake: it is a feature of the paranoid logic of the censoring mentality that virtue ... must be innocent, and therefore, unless protected, vulnerable to the wiles of vice.

In order to be cruel we have to close our hearts to the suffering of the other.

His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences.