Then there was a silence he had never before experienced: in it, you could hear the years.

What is it that we call loneliness. It can’t simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it?

There were people who read and there were the others. Whether you were the a reader or a non-reader was soon apparent. There was no greater distinction between people.

[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity.

I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.

'De nada,' replied Gregorius. The Portuguese couple sat down, the train went on. Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it had never stopped impressing him.

Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us -- what happens with the rest?