"It would cost little to march them out into the desert . . . to have them dig, with their last strength, a pit large enough for all of them to lie in (or even dig it for them!), and, leaving them buried there forever and forever, to come back to the walled town full of new intentions, new resolutions.”"

"It would be best if this obscure chapter in the history of the world were terminated at once, if these ugly people were obliterated from the face of the earth and we swore to make a new start, to run an empire in which there would be no more injustice, no more pain."

"It is the knowledge of how contingent my unease is, how dependent on a baby that wails beneath my window one day and does not wail the next, that brings the worst shame to me, the greatest indifference to annihilation."

"But more often in the very act of caressing her I am overcome with sleep as if polelaxed, fall into oblivion sprawled upon her body, and wake an hour or two later dizzy, confused, thirsty. These dreamless spells are like death to me, or enchantment, black, outside time."

"We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients."

"There is nothing to link me with torturers, people who sit waiting like beetles in dark cellars."

"I search for secrets and answers, no matter how bizarre, like an old woman reading tea-leaves."

"How can I believe that a bed is anything but a bed, a woman’s body anything but a site of joy? I must assert my distance from Colonel Joll! I will not suffer for his crimes!"

"I wish that these barbarians would rise up and teach us a lesson, so that we would learn to respect them."

"I am not unaware of what such daydreams signify, dreams of becoming an unthinking savage, of taking the cold road back to the capital, of groping my way out to the ruins in the desert, of returning to the confinement of my cell, of seeking out the barbarians and offering myself to them to use as they wish."

"This is not the scene I dreamed of. Like much else nowadays I leave it feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere."

"I could live here forever, he thought, or till I die. Nothing would happen, every day would be the same as the day before, there would be nothing to say. The anxiety that belonged to the time on the road began to leave him. Sometimes, as he walked, he did not know whether he was awake or asleep. He could understand that people should have retreated here and fenced themselves in with miles and miles of silence; he could understand that they should have wanted to bequeath the privilege of so much silence to their children and grandchildren in perpetuity (though by what right he was not sure); he wondered whether there were not forgotten corners and angles and corridors between the fences, land that belonged to no one yet. Perhaps if one flew high enough, he thought, one would be able to see."

"There seemed nothing to do but live."

"He closed his eyes and tried to recover in his imagination the mudbrick walls and reed roof of her stories, the garden of prickly pear, the chickens scampering for the feed scattered by the little barefoot girl. And behind that child, in the doorway, her face obscured by shadow, he searched for a second woman, the woman from whom his mother had come into the world. When my mother was dying in the hospital, he thought, when she knew her end was coming, it was not me she looked to but someone who stood behind me: her mother or the ghost of her mother. To me she was a woman but to herself she was still a child calling to her mother to hold her hand and help her. And her own mother, in the secret life we do not see, was a child too. I come from a line of children without end."

"Do any of us believe in what we are doing here? I doubt it. Her NCO husband least of all. We are given an old racetrack and a quantity of barbed wire and told to effect a change in men's souls. Not being experts on the soul but assuming cautiously that it has some connection with the body, we set our captives to doing pushups and marching back and forth."

"He is like a stone, a pebble that, having lain around quietly minding its own business since the dawn of time, is now suddenly picked up and tossed randomly from hand to hand. A hard little stone, barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself and its interior life. He passes through these institutions and camps and hospitals and God knows what else like a stone. Through the intestines of war. An unbearing, unborn creature."

"Though this is a large country, so large that you would think there would be space for everyone, what I have learned from life tells me that it is hard to keep out of the camps. Yet I am convinced there are areas that lie between the camps and belong to no camp, not even to the catchment areas of the camps — certain mountaintops, for example, certain islands in the middle of swamps, certain arid strips where human beings may not find it worth their while to live. I am looking for such a place in order to settle there, perhaps only till things improve, perhaps forever. I am not so foolish, however, as to imagine that I can rely on maps and roads to guide me. Therefore I have chosen you to show me the way."

"You want to stop on the expressway, you pull fifty metres off the roadside...Anything nearer, you can get shot, no warning, no questions asked.'"

"Perhaps, [Michael] thought, it was better when one did not have to rely on other people"

"Michael K sat ... watching his mother polish other people's floors, learning to be quiet."

"If she was going to die, she would at least die under blue skies"

"Though he had no more business there, he found it hard to tear himself from the hospital."

"He did not seem to have a belief, or did not seem to have a belief regarding help."

"But why should people with nowhere to go run away from the nice life we've got here?"

"They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die"

"He could not imagine ... driving stakes into the ground, erecting fences, dividing up the land"

"His was always a story with a hole in it: a wrong story, always wrong"

"Can't you tell the difference between a thin man and a skeleton?"

"There is no home left for universal souls, except perhaps in Antarctica or on the high seas"

"As time passed, however, I slowly began to see the originality of the resistance you offered"

"I discovered out in the country ... that there is time enough for everything"

"At last I could row no further. My hands were blistered, my back was burned, my body ached. With a sigh, making barely a splash, I slipped overboard. With slow strokes, my long hair floating about me, like a flower of the sea, like an anemone, like a jellyfish of the kind you see in the waters of Brazil, I swam towards the strange island, for a while swimming as I had rowed, against the current, then all at once free of its grip, carried by the waves into the bay and on to the beach."

"But the island on which I was cast away was quite another place: a great rocky hill with a flat top, rising sharply from the sea on all sides except one, dotted with drab bushes that never flowered and never shed their leaves."

"Crushed under his soles whole clusters of the thorns that had pierced my skin."

"The stranger (who was of course the Cruso I told you of)."

"Would gladly now recount to you the history of this singular Cruso, as I heard it from his own lips. But the stories he told me were so various and so hard to reconcile one with another, that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his memory, he no longer knew for sure what truth, what fancy."

"Nothing I have forgotten is worth the remembering."

"At last I could row no further."

"But those whom we have abused we customarily grow to hate."

"Not every man who bears the mark of the castaway is a castaway by heart."

"I would rather be the author of my story than have lies told about me."

"It was I who shared Cruso's bed and closed Cruso's eyes."

"A being without substance, a ghost beside the true body of Cruso."

"To live in silence is to live like the whales."

"The less they seem to me like fields waiting to be planted, the more like tombs."

"In a sea of fallen leaves we sit, she and I, two substantial beings."

"He is the child of his silence."

"I do not love him, but he is mine."