1. “And all these questions I ask myself. It is not in a spirit of curiosity. I cannot be silent. About myself I need know nothing. Here all is clear. No, all is not clear. But the discourse must go on. So one invents obscurities. Rhetoric.”
2. “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
3. ”He stopped crying. The tears of the world are a constant quantity. As soon as someone starts crying, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. So do not speak ill of this generation. It is no better or worse than it's predecessor. Do not speak well of it either. Do not speak of it at all.”
4. “His plan therefore was not to refuse admission to the idea, but to keep it at bay until his mind was ready to receive it. Then let it in and pulverise it. Obliterate the bastard.”
5. “How can one better magnify the Almighty than by sniggering with him at his little jokes, particularly the poorer ones.”
6. ”"Humanity is a well with two buckets," said Wylie, "one going down to be filled, the other coming up to be emptied."”
7. ”I believe him, I know it's my only chance to -- my only chance, I believe all I'm told, I've disbelieved only too much in my long life, now I swallow everything, greedily. What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I'm not sure of it.”
8. ”If I have said anything to the contrary I was mistaken. If I say anything to the contrary again I shall be mistaken again. Unless I am mistaken now. Into the dossier with it in any case, in support of whatever thesis you fancy.”
9. “I have my faults, but changing my tune is not one of them.”
10. ”I say farce deliberately, in the hope of covering up for you. That's what our best authors do, they call their most serious works farces, in case no one is prepared to take them seriously.”
11. “I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.”
12. ”Is not a uniform suffering preferable to one which, by its ups and downs, is liable at certain moments to encourage the view that perhaps after all it is not eternal?”
13. “Let me go to hell, that's all I ask, and go on cursing them there, and them look down and hear me, that might take some of the shine off their bliss.”
14. "Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful!"
15. “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world.”
16. “Nothing matters but writing. There has been nothing else worthwhile. . . a stain upon the silence.”
17. ”"Once a certain degree of insight has been reached," said Wylie, "all men talk, when talk they must, the same tripe."”
18. ”Saying is inventing. Wrong, very rightly wrong. You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten, life without tears, as it is wept.”
19. “Say what you will, you can't keep a dead mind down.”
20. “She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.”
21. “That the impossible should be asked of me, good, what else could be asked of me? But the absurd! Of me whom they have reduced to reason.”
22. “There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the fault of his feet.”
23. “The sun shone having no alternative on the nothing new.”
24. “To think, when one is no longer young, when one is not yet old, that one is no longer young, that one is not yet old, that is perhaps something.”
25. ”We are all born mad. Some remain so.”
26. “What do I know of man's destiny? I could tell you more about radishes.”
27. ”Words are all we have.”
28. ”You were saying something nice about me, I can feel it.”
29. ”...you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is black and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what it is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.”
