"I thought it might make him despair of life, but he has despaired anyway."

"I'm not like other people, my life just doesn't work, it never has."

"Life is horrible, horrible, horrible, said the philosopher."

"I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie."

"And she wondered now how she could go on existing through the successive moments of her life."

"Oh how stupid I am, he said to himself, using words which he had used ever so often since he was a child. At that moment it seemed to him that his life had consisted of one blunder after another, and now aged thirty-one he was well on into the stupidest of all."

"But I've had such a rotten life. People like me are a problem."

"I lead a worthless life, he thought, I live in unreality and untruth. If only there could be total change, regeneration, escape. If only I could run and run and get back to the people, back to where real wholesome, ordinary life is being lived. I have given myself a mean role and cannot now stop enacting it. Oh if only I could get out! But even as he thought these familiar thoughts he knew: unreality is my reality, untruth is my truth, I am too old now and I have no other way."

"My God, that bloody casket has fallen on the floor! Some people were hammering in the next flat and it fell off its bracket. The lid has come off and whatever was inside it has certainly got out. Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of human life, what next I wonder?"

"But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty."