"The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you are dead. To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate was is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."

"I wish I could find people who just would fight me and break through to me and hold me down and scream their life into my face."

I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument for loss. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, there was no such thing as an empty canvas.

Paris tries to be understanding. I don't make this process very easy for people. After weeks of haranguing the girls in my bunk about the genius of Bruce Springsteen, when they finally say that they're getting to like him, when they ask to borrow tapes or make requests to hear Born to Run, I just start yelling that they're all a bunch of unoriginal copycats and Bruce belongs to me alone. I make them swear that if they ever meet anyone new and claim to like any Springsteen songs, they'll remember to footnote me. And they all throw up their hands and say, Look, we're trying.

Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her, and that for whatever reason, she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming, always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table, ivory elephant charm, rainbow, onion, hairdo, violence, melodrama, honey...None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly, searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her, but to each she would have to say, I don't love you.

In that situation, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realised that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you'll find you've become a butcher. And if you don't want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you're going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts.

The morning I got up to begin this book I coughed. Something was coming out of my throat: it was strangling me. I broke the thread which held it and yanked it out. I went back to bed and said: I have just spat out my heart.

There is an instrument called the quena made of human bones. It owes its origin to the worship of an Indian for his mistress. When she died he made a flute out of her bones. The quena has a more penetrating, more haunting sound than the ordinary flute.

Those who write know the process. I thought of it as I was spitting out my heart.

Only I do not wait for my love to die.

if there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it heavy walls, and we will furnish it with soft red interiors, from the inside out, and give it a knocker that resonates like a diamond falling to a jeweler's felt so that we should never hear it. Love me, because love doesn't exist, and I have tried everything that does.

They say nothing is wasted; either that, or it all is.

When I look back, it's not those misdeeds that I regret - I'd do them again, I tells ya - but the times when I conformed. I regret that I didn't realise that actually they've got no power over you at school - it's all just a trick to indoctrinate you into being a conditioned, tame, placid citizen. Rebel, children, I urge you, fight the turgid slick of conformity with which they seek to smother your glory.

"It's difficult to believe in yourself because the idea of self is an artificial construction. You are, in fact, part of the glorious oneness of the universe. Everything beautiful in the world is within you. No one really feels self-confident deep down because it's an artifical idea. Really, people aren't that worried about what you're doing or what you're saying, so you can drift around the world relatively anonymously: you must not feel persucted and examined. Liberate yourself from that idea that people are watching you."

My dad's philosophy was (and I think still is) that life is a malevolent force, which seeks to destroy you, and you have to struggle with it. Only those who are hard enough will succeed. Most people get crushed, but if you fight, in the end life will go, 'Fucking hell. This one's serious. Let him through.'

I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

"I went to a party once, and there was a palm reader there and when she looked at my hand, she just froze. And I said to her, I know. My lifeline is broken. I know I won't live past thirty."

"D'you know what happens when you hurt people?" Ammu said. "When you hurt people, they begin to love you less. That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less."

A cold moth with unusually dense dorsal tufts landed lightly on Rahel's heart. Where its icy legs touched her, she got goosebumps. Six goosebumps on her careless heart.

A little less her Ammu loved her.

And so, out the gate, up the road, and to the left. The taxi stand. A hurt mother, an ex-nun, a hot child and a cold one. Six goosebumps and a moth.

"I was happy," Ammu said, and realized that she had been.

"If you're happy in a dream, Ammu, does that count?" Estha asked.

"Does what count?"

"The happiness - does it count?"

She knew exactly what he meant, her son with his spoiled puff.

Because the truth is, that only what counts counts.

"I'm not interested. I guide meself and if I bump into walls I bump into walls. I'm a little bumper car, me."

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

"Ow, ow. Ow."

"Am I hurting you?"

"No, you're touching me."

"You're gonna base your whole life on who you got stuck in a room with?"

"I'm gonna base this moment on who I'm stuck in a room with. That's what life is. It's a series of rooms. And who we get stuck in those rooms with adds up to what our lives are."