So I found a different technique: I counted seventy-two then I mentally chalked up one. I started again and chalked up two, but I was afraid of getting confused with these two different scales. Then a woman would come along and act as an abacus: I’d say one, she’d remember it, then I’d say two. She soon became unnecessary because I didn’t make any

Every thirty days, I say to myself that a month has gone by, but those are mere words, they don’t really give me time. Perhaps you never have time when you are alone? You only acquire it by watching it go by in others, and since all the women have died, it only affects the scrawny plants growing between the stones and producing, occasionally, just

I try to imagine myself being warm: there’s always a point when the whip cracks.

After all, if I was a human being, my story was as important as that of King Lear or of Prince Hamlet that William Shakespeare had taken the trouble to relate in detail.

And now, racked with sobs, I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering and that I was human after all. I

No one will come because there are only corpses. How could the father of Prince Hamlet, if he was dead, appear and talk to him?

human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity,

But the young guard almost never stayed longer than six hours, according to my heart.

‘We’re not very resourceful, are we!’ said Greta ruefully. ‘We come from a world where it wasn’t necessary, everything was ready-made and we never asked how things were produced,’ replied Frances.