"No, Paul, I couldn't care less if you tell me made-up stories. Our lies reveal as much about us as our truths.' (Said to Paul by Elizabeth Costello, the interloping novelist-angel-inner voice)."

"For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing."

"Was it serious? I don't know. It certainly had serious consequences."

"She gives him what he can only call a sweet smile. 'So you are determined to go on being bad. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I promise, no one will ask you to change."

"Words are coin. Words alienate. Language is no medium for desire. Desire is rapture, not exchange."

"Where civilization entailed the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of dependent people, I decided, I was opposed to civilization."

"It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet."

"You are going to end up as one of those sad old men who poke around in rubbish bins.” “I’m going to end up in a hole in the ground... And so are you. So are we all."

"I am not the we of anyone"

"Because a woman's beauty does not belong to her alone. It is a part of the bounty she brings into the world. She has a duty to share it."

"Perhaps; but I am a difficult person to live with. My difficulty consists in not wanting to live with other people."

"Pain is truth; all else is subject to doubt."

"We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable."

"His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul."

"A book should be an axe to chop open the frozen sea inside us."

"(I)f we are going to be kind, let it be out of simple generosity, not because we fear guilt or retribution."

"The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do."

"When all else fails, philosophize."

"Become major, Paul. Live like a hero. That's what the classics teach us. Be a main character. Otherwise what is life for?"

"Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he ever wrong?"

"With the smell of beer I try to get the smell of death off me. And only the smell of death will get the smell of beer off you, like all the drinkers whose graves I have to dig."

"Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise."

"The cemetery is the home of those who are not here, come in."

"...Life is nothing "but "trading smells."