Crowds of people moved through the streets with a dream-like violence.

Prayers for the condemned man will be offered on an adding machine. Numbers constitute the only universal language.

At college, and perhaps for a year afterwards, they had believed in literature, had believed in Beauty and in personal expression as an absolute end. When they lost this belief, they lost everything.

Only those who still have hope can benefit from tears.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.

He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.