The more images I gathered from the past, I said, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the past had actually happened in this or that way, for nothing about it could be called normal: most of it was absurd, and if not absurd, then appalling.

I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time.

Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment

Everything our civilization has produced is entombed.