“I sometimes wish I could go off in search of something, (…) but before getting even that far, I myself wouldn't have the slightest idea what to search for. Now my father, he's someone who been searching for something all his life. He's still searching today. Ever since I was a little boy, my father's told me about the white sheep that came to him in his dreams. So I always thought that's what life is like. An ongoing search.”

“For months I'd been stuck, unable to take one step in any new direction. The world kept moving on; I alone was at a standstill.”

“I'm forever realizing things too late.”

“I heard the sound of waves, recalled the scent of a long-forgotten evening.”

“Had somebody else been living my life all this time?”

“A new lithograph I'd not seen before, of a fish with wings. The fish didn't look too happy about its wings. Probably wasn't sure how to use them either.”

“—C'mon now, there's no honest work anywhere. Just like there's no honest breathing or honest pissing. (…) And no doubt there's an innocent town somewhere where an innocent butcher slices innocent ham.”

“—The doings of men run to unrealities. Why is that? (…) Because it appears simpler. Added to which, there are circumstances whereby unreality contrives to create an impression that overwhelms reality.”

“We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.”

“Not that it matters much. It's like doughnut holes. Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.”

“As long as I stared at the clock, at least the world remained in motion. Not a very consequential world, but in motion nonetheless. And as long as I knew the world was still in motion, I knew I existed. Not a very consequential existence, but an existence nonetheless. It struck me as wanting that someone should confirm his own existence only by the hands of an electric wall clock.”

“We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on.”

“—What I mean is, I don't really know if it's the right thing to do, making new life. Kids grow up, generations take their place. What does it all come to? More hills bulldozed and more oceanfront filled in? Faster cars and more cats run over? Who needs it?
—That's only the dark side of things. Good things happen too, good people can make things worthwhile."

“It was an everything-works-out-in-the-end-so-maybe-war's-not-so-bad-after-all sort of film. One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end.”

“Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. (…) With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously.”

“The world is mediocre. (…) has the world been mediocre since time immemorial? No. In the beginning, the world was chaos, and chaos is not mediocre. The mediocratization began when people separated the means of production from daily life.”

“(…) he had risen to the top, in every sense of the word, of the right wing. He had charisma, a solid ideology, powers of speech making to command a passionate response, political savvy, decisiveness, and above all the ability to steer society by using the weaknesses of the masses for leverage.”

“You cease to be a unique entity unto yourself, but exist simply as chaos. And not just the chaos that is you; your chaos is also my chaos. To wit, existence is communication, and communication, existence.”

“There're many things we don't really know. It's an illusion that we know anything at all.”

“— I pretty much know every inch of your body. What's there to be ashamed of at this late date?
— Body cells replace themselves every month. Even at this very moment (…) Most everything you think you know about me is nothing more than memories.”

"He embodied the memory of my first world. (...) He incorporated my past. With him I traveled through all the ages of life, my life.”

"There was great sweetness to that layer of time which stood between us, it gave more intensity to the present. That my long memory of the time before his birth was, in short, the counterpart, the inverted image of what his own memory would be after my death, with events and political figures I would never know, did not cross my mind. In any case, through his very existence, he was my death, as were my sons for me, and as I had been for my mother, who died before having seen the Soviet Union fall but could remember the bells that rang throughout the country on November 11, 1918.”

" (...) most of the time discreetly, it disturbed me less than the self-assurance with which young women chatted him up right in front of me, as if the presence of an older woman at his side were a negligible or even nonexistent obstacle.”

"We went to see films depicting affairs between young men and older women. We came out disappointed, irritated by story lines in which we found nothing that resembled our experience, films in which the woman begged and pleaded and ended up cast aside, destroyed."

"Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex was a revelation that opened my eyes to 'a world made by men and for men.'"

"In contrast to the days when I was eighteen, or twenty-five, and completely immersed in anything that happened to me, with neither past nor future, in Rouen, with A, I felt as if I were reenacting scenes and actions already past— from the play of my youth."

"Often I have made love to force myself to write. I hoped to find in the fatigue, the dereliction that comes after, reasons not to expect anything more from life. I hoped that orgasm, the most violent end to waiting that can be, would make me feel certain that there is no greater pleasure than writing a book."

"It’s true that a young man in one’s bed takes the mind off time and age. This need for a man is so terrible, so close to a desire for death, an annihilation of self, how long can it go on…I also know it’s because he’s a Soviet that I love him. It’s the absolute mystery – exoticism, some might say. But why not? I am fascinated by the ‘Russian soul’, or the ‘Soviet soul’, or by the whole USSR, at once so physically close – culturally too (in the past) – and yet so different (I don’t have the same feeling about China or India, whose ‘otherness’ is more radical – a racist sentiment?)."

"Yesterday, it came to me with certainty that I write my love stories and live my books, in a perpetual round dance."

“Love was a country he knew nothing about.”

“The coloured people were having a good time because they sensed that, for whatever reason, this crowd was solidly with them; and the white people were having a good time because nobody was putting them down for being white.”

“— Honey you ain't no bigger than a minute.
— Sometimes a minute can be a mighty powerful thing.'”

“Something touched his imagination for a moment, suggesting that Leona was a person and had her story and that all stories were trouble.”

“—Sometimes I think I'll just give up. But how do you give up?”

“They encountered the big world (…). It stared unsympathetically out at them from the eyes of the passing people; and Rufus realised that he had not thought at all about this world and its power to hate and destroy.”

“There was something frightening about the aspect of old friends, old lovers, who had, mysteriously, come to nothing. It argued the presence of some cancer which had been operating in them, invisibly, all along and which might, now, be operating in oneself.”

“— Have you ever wished you were queer?'
— I used to think maybe I was. Hell, I think I even wished I was.' (…) But I'm not. So I'm stuck.'”

“Yet, he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within this body had driven him into such a desolate place. The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation. And still the music continued.”

“(…) he wondered where such a violent emptiness might drive an entire city.”

“The college boys, gleaming with ignorance and mad with chastity, made terrified efforts to attract the feminine attention, but succeeded only in attracting each other.”

“He kept thinking of Leona; it came in waves, like the pain of a toothache or a festering wound.”

“—I hope (…) that you won't sit around blaming yourself too much. Or too long. That won't undo anything. (…) When you're older you'll see, I think, that we all commit our crimes. The thing is not to lie about them - to try to understand what you have done, why you have done it.”

“He stood on the platform now, alone with all these people, who were each of them alone(…).”

“Many white people and many black people, chained together in time and in space, and by history, and all of them in a hurry. In a hurry to get away from each other, he thought, but we ain't never going to make it. We been fucked for fair.”

“He raised his eyes to heaven. He thought, You bastard, you motherfucking bastard. Ain't I your baby, too? He began to cry. Something in Rufus which could not break shook him like a rag doll and splashed salt water all over his face and filled his throat and his nostrils with anguish. He knew the pain would never stop.”

“—I've told you, you always seem to get involved with impossible women - whores, nymphomaniacs, drunks - and think you do it in order to protect yourself - from anything serious. Permanent.”

“—Richard, you and I have hurt each other - many times. Sometimes we didn't mean to and sometimes we did. And wasn't it because - just because - we loved - love - each other?”

“—What a funny girl you are. You've got a bad case of penis envy.
"—So do most men.”

“—I kept thinking, They're coloured and I'm white but the same things have happened, really the same things, and how can I make them know that?'
—But they didn't happen to you because you were white. They just happened. But what happens up here (…) happens because they are coloured. And that makes a difference.'”

“And don't none of us know what goes on in the heart of someone, don't many of us know what's going on in our own hearts for the matter of that, and so can't none of us say why he did what he did.”

“—I hate funerals they never seem to have anything to do with the person who died.
—No, funerals are for the living.”

“Yes, he had been there: chafing and pushing and pounding, trying to awaken a frozen girl. The battle was awful because the girl wished to be awakened but was terrified of the unknown. (…) Both clung to a fantasy rather than to each other, tried to suck pleasure from the crannies of the mind, rather than surrender the secrets of the body.”

“He knew that Harlem was a battlefield and that a war was being waged there day and night - but of the war aims he knew nothing.”

“The light seemed to fall with an increased hardness, examining and inciting the city with an unsparing violence, like the violence of love (…).”

“—What a great difference there is (…) between dreaming of something and dealing with it!'”

“Strangers' faces hold no secrets because the imagination does not invest them with any. But the face of a lover is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”

“Or would she merely accept his secrets as she accepted his body, happy to be the vehicle of his relief? While offering in return (for she knew the rules) revelations intended to pacify and also intended to frustrate him; to frustrate, that is, any attempt on his part to strike deeper into that incredible country in which, like the princess of fairy tales, sealed in a high tower and guarded by beasts, bewitched and exiled, she paced her secret round of secret days.”

“(…) it was Yves who had come to live with him, but each was, for the other, the dwelling place that each had despaired of finding.”

“And what were these terrors? They were buried beneath the impossible language of the time, lived underground where nearly all of the time's true feeling spitefully and incessantly fermented. Precisely, therefore, to the extent that they were inexpressible, were these terrors mighty; precisely because they lived in the dark were their shapes obscene. And because the taste for obscenity is universal and the appetite for reality rare and hard to cultivate, he had nearly perished in the basement of his private life. Or, more precisely, his fantasies.”

“The aim of the dreamer, after all, is merely to go on dreaming and not to be molested by the world. His dreams are his protection against the world. But the aims of life are antithetical to those of the dreamer, and the teeth of the world are sharp.”

“They were husbands, they were fathers, gangsters, football players, rovers; and they were everywhere. Or they were, in any case, in all of the places he had been assured they could not be found and the need they brought to him was one they scarcely knew they had, (…) which could only be satisfied in the shameful, the punishing dark, and quickly, with flight and aversion as the issue of the act. They fled, with the infection lanced but with the root of the infection still in them.”

“They came, this army, not out of joy but out of poverty, and in the most tremendous ignorance. Something had been frozen in them, the root of their affections had been frozen so that they could no longer accept affection, though it was from this lack that they were perishing. The dark submission was the shadow of love - if only someone, somewhere, loved them enough to caress them this way, in the light, with joy! But then they could no longer be passive.”

“And the encounter took place, at last, between two dreamers, neither of whom could wake the other, except for the bitterest and briefest of seconds. Then sleep descended again, the search continued, chaos came again.”

“Affection had appeared, but through a fissure, a crevice, in the person, through which, behind affection, came all the winds of fear. For the act of love is a confession, One lies about the body but the body does not lie about itself; it cannot lie about the force which drives it.”

“Paris seemed, and had seemed for a long time, the loneliest city under heaven. And whoever prolongs his sojourn in that city - who tries, that is, to make a home there - is doomed to discover that there is no one to be blamed for whatever happens to him. Contrary to its legend, Paris does not offer many distractions; or, those distractions that it offers are like French pastry, vivid and insubstantial, sweet on the tongue and sour in the belly. Then the discontented wanderer is thrown back on himself - if his life is to become bearable, only he can make it so.”

“It was the fear of making a total commitment, a vow: it was the fear of being loved.”

“All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only colour in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the grey, unquestioning mediocre.”

“—People do not take the relations between boys seriously, you know that. We will never know many people who believe we love each other. They do not believe there can be tears between men. They think we are only playing a game and that we do it to shock them.'”

“(…) a positive storm of tenderness. Everything in him, from his heights and depths, his mysterious, hidden source, came rushing together, like a great flood barely channelled in a narrow mountain stream. And it chilled him like that - like icy water; and roared in him like that, and with the menace of things scarcely understood, barely to be controlled; and he shook with violence with which he flowed toward Yves. It was this violence which made him gentle, for it frightened him.”

“It seemed to have no sense whatever of the exigencies of human life; it was so familiar and so public that it became, at last, the most despairingly private of cities. One was continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch; and if one was never - it was the general complaint - left alone in New York, one had, still, to fight very hard in order not to perish of loneliness. This fight, carried on in so many different ways, created the strange climate of the city.”

“The old pain receded into the home it had made in him. But another pain, homeless as yet, began knocking at his heart - not for the first time: it would force an entry one day, and remain with him for ever.”

“—People don't have any mercy. They tear you limb from limb, in the name of love. Then, when you're dead, when they've killed you by what they made you go through, they say you didn't have any character. They weep big, bitter tears - not for you. For themselves, because they've lost their toy.'”

“All for the first time, in the days when acts had no consequences and nothing was irrecoverable, and love was simple and even pain had the dignity of enduring forever: it was unimaginable that time could do anything to diminish it.”

“(…) which placed her under the necessity of finding out what was in his heart by revealing what was in hers. And she did not yet know what was in her heart - or did not want to know.”

“ Policemen were neither friends nor enemies; they were part of the landscape, present for the purpose of upholding law and order; and if a policeman - for she had never thought of them as being very bright - seemed to forget his place, it was easy enough to make him remember it. Easy enough if one's place was more secure than his, and if one represented, or could bring to bear, a power greater than his own. For all policemen were bright enough to know who they were working for and they were not working, anywhere in the world, for the powerless.”

“—The question is - what do we want to be?
— I want to be me.”

“Ida and Vivaldo buried their disputes in silence, in the mined field. It seemed better than finding themselves hoarse, embittered, gasping, and more than ever alone.”

“It's very hard to live with (…) the sense that one is never what one seems - never - and yet, what one seems to be is probably, in some sense, almost exactly what one is.”

“And if it's children you're after, well, you can do that in five minutes and you haven't got to love anybody to do it. If all the children who get here every year were brought here by love, wow! baby, what a bright world this would be!'”

“But, Cass, ask yourself, look out and ask yourself - wouldn't you hate all white people if they kept you in prison here? (…) And not in a hurry, like from one day to the next, but, every day, every day, for years, for generations? Shit. They keep you here because you're black, while they go around jerking themselves off with all the jazz about the land of the free and the home of the brave. And they want you to jerk yourself off with the same music, too, only keep your distance. Some days, honey, I wish I could turn myself into one big fist and grind this miserable country to powder. Some days, I don't believe it has a right to exist.”

“You said once (…) that you wanted to grow. Isn't that always frightening? Doesn't it always hurt?”

“It's incredible that a sentence is ever understood. Mere sounds strung together by some agent attempting to mean some thing but the meaning need not, and does not, confine itself to that intention.”

“The world demands that you introduce yourself twice, first as you are, and second as you are told to be.”

“It would of course be a shame to get too old. There’s no virtue in living too long. Living shouldn’t become a habit.”

"The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive."

"That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains."

"The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you."

"That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality."

"Silence creates its own violence."

"The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?"

"We all live in a kind of continuous dream,” I told him. “When we wake, it is because something, some event, some pinprick even, disturbs the edges of what we’ve taken as reality."

"Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth."