Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.

First of all, don't mix your hairpins up with mine! You .... Oh! All right, mix your muck with mine. Mix it! Mix your rags with my tatters! Mix it all up.

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it's also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.