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Thucydides: "To be hated and odious for the moment is the fate of all who have tried to rule others, but whoever accepts this jealousy with a view towards the greatest things judges well. For hatred does not last long, but the splendor of the present and the glory of the future remain in memory forever.

Thucydides: "I think that the truest explanation [for the Peloponnesian War], although it has been the least noticed, was the growth of Athens to a great power, which brought fear to the Spartans and compelled war."

All of us walk near the truth and uncover it from various sides.

At first, one is surprised that stupid people should have within them such an assertive convincing intonation. But it is as it should be. Otherwise no one would listen to them.

Although it was a month to Christmas, the advertising orgy had begun and the buying hysteria spread as swiftly and ruthlessly as the Black Death along the festooned shopping streets. The epidemic swept all before it and there was no escape.

Look after yourself. You are now by yourself on the highway of life, so don't forget your provincial relations -- they love you very dearly and are always there to help you.

Then he was struck by the fact that he looked curiously ill. His face—ordinarily by no means attenuated—seemed to have fallen in, there were dark circles under his eyes, and the perturbed Lawrence, observing him as the meal progressed, thought that his manner, too, seemed strange and once or twice quite absent-minded.

To have the dream of a lifetime fulfilled -- and spoilt in the fulfilling; to enter at last the Promised Land, and find it a desert; that was the tragedy which, in her sixty-first year, had befallen meek, unimportant Ellen Wright, and was heavy on her now.

A menace hovered over everything, giving life a peculiar coloration.

What I am writing here, evening after evening, in my house in the center of my city, of my universe, of my world, is an anti-book, the forever obscure work of an anti-author. I am no one and will stay that way. I am alone and there;s no cure for being alone: but I don't lie to anyone, painting doors that will never open on the walls of this Piranesian world.

Life is a game. You have to learn the rules and navigate the paths through bad things and good, past the nice faces and the bloodthirsty glares. This game teaches you everything you need to know to make it down the long and hard path waiting for you after death.

I don't believe in books—I believe in pages, in phrases, in lines. There are some, in some books, like in the coded text a general receives on the battlefield: only some of the words mean anything, surrounded by meaningless blather. The general places his cardboard stencil over the letter and reads only the words that appear in the cutout spaces. That's how we should read the 3-dimensional text of existence.

Pain is another word for reality.

My memories of childhood and adolescence contain chains of events I can barely place and cannot understand, like puzzle pieces tossed into a box. They appear so clearly before my eyes that my mind is full of images and allegorical figures, all of them enigmatic, because enigma is a sign of incompleteness: a god is only the visible part of a world with one more dimension than our own.

Melancholy Timor Mortis
To the village went again—
Life, once long, now growing short is;
King Remorse begins to reign.
As vacant as a holiday
In one fixed spot he seemed to stay...
The sea was black, the sky was grey,
Like slimy eggs the muddy clay
Soiled boots once polished far away...

'What had happened just now?' asked Timortis. 'Had you fallen out of your boat?'
'I was getting on with my job,' said the man. 'They throw dead things into this water for me to fish out again. With my teeth. That's what I'm paid to do.'

So, even if the late colonel was not to be buried, it seemed then that the spot where he lay nailed to the ground and covered with plastic bags was to be marked with the bright aluminum pole, which could be seen from afar.

Adelard of Bath: I will detract nothing from God, for whatever is, is from him.... We must listen to the very limits of human knowledge and only when this utterly breaks down should we refer things to God.

"Please, tell us we're in Miami ..." [one of the Dominican stowaways] begged.
Paco gave a nervous snicker.
"Miami? You're kidding. You're in Veracruz!"
One of the men let out a sob.
"How much further to Miami?"

Ah America, so big, so sad, so black, you're like the leafs of a dry summer that go crinkly ere August found its end, you're hopeless, everyone you look on you, there's nothing but the dry drear hopelessness, the knowledge of impending death, the suffering of present life, lights of Christmas wont save you or anybody, any more you could put Christmas lights on a dead bush in August....

That's what a book is: a title that's completely unfurled, whereas a title, in turn, is a book condensed to the size of a few words. Rather: a title is a book in restricto, while a book is a title in extenso.

Love makes comprehensible everything that is hidden and irrational, revealing the secret meaning of the loved object.

I can promise you that, although [the town of] Akranes seems quiet, we've actually got more than enough on our plate. There's plenty going on under the surface, so you won't be sitting around twiddling your thumbs.

But it was not possible for him to conjure away the drama that was preparing in the wings -- a drama that would unfold in intense, sinister, inevitable catastrophe, with no consolation for him ever -- either in the sweet rewards of domestic peace or in the glories of public life.

Sorrow is a necessity of life. The sufferings of others remind us of our own and serve as a corrective to happiness, an excess of which can engender pride.

Do you realize that with this wonderful news you've just brought me, half the people in town could be considered suspects?

I see we're getting on to myself as a Catholic novelist. I'm not that: I'm a novelist who happens to be a Catholic. The theme of human beings lonely without God is a legitimate subject. To want to deal with the theme doesn't make me a theologian.