‘True, but I’ll know what you think, you’ll know what I think, and perhaps that will spark off a new idea, and then we’ll feel as if we’re behaving like human beings rather than robots.’

I must be lacking in certain experiences that make a person fully human.

I felt a surge of grief, I, who had never known men, as I stood in front of this man who had wanted to overcome fear and despair to enter eternity upright and furious.

‘You have so little idea what it meant to have a destiny that you can’t understand what it means to be deprived as we are.

I read and reread the book. I acquired a perfectly useless knowledge, but I enjoyed it.

what does having lived mean once you are no longer alive?

They will have my thoughts in them. The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.

But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I’ve realised these past few years.

But human beings need to speak, otherwise they lose their humanity, as I’ve realised these past few years.