“And, conversely, she went on to herself, sneering at the Grand Duke's palace, poverty is wasted on the poor, who never know how to make the best of things, are only the rich without money, are just as useless at looking after themselves, can't handle their cash just like the rich can't, always squandering it on bright, pretty, useless things in just the same way.”

“At length the grandeur of the mountains becomes monotonous; with familiarity, the landscape ceases to provoke awe and wonder and the traveller sees the alps with the indifferent eye of those who always live there.”

“What do you see when you see me?' She asked him, burying her own face in his bosom. 'Do you want the truth?'She nodded.'The firing squad.''That's not the whole truth. Try again.''Insatiability,' he said with some bitterness.'That's oblique but altogether too simple. Once more,' she insisted. 'One more time.'He was silent for several minutes.'The map of a country in which I only exist by virtue of the extravagance of my metaphors.''Now you're being too sophisticated. And, besides, what metaphors do we have in common?”

“Comedy is tragedy that happens to other people.”

“A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.”

“There Peter sat in the new sunlight, plaiting the straw for baskets, until he saw the thing he had been taught most to fear advancing silently along the lea of an outcrop of rock.”

“She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-man’s land between life and death, sleeping and waking.”

“To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with.”

“Aeneas carried his aged father on his back from the ruins of Troy and so do we all, whether we like it or not, perhaps even if we have never known them.”

“Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death.”

“Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit.’ Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?’ She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plangent twang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears.”