“Azarius, for his part, had not made her voyage to the depths of pain to understand that death and birth, in that place, have almost the same tragic meaning.”

“He had preserved the best part of her and made it his own: the principle of her scent.”

“She had opened a door… and now she was walking with demons. And at the end of her travels, she would have her revenge… Pain had made a sadist of her.”

“And in an infinite regress:
Tell me, why is the pain of birth
lighter borne than the pain of death?”

“I dreamt last night Christ came to earth again
To bless His own. My soul from place to place
On her dream-quest sped, seeking for His face
Through temple and town and lovely land, in vain.
Then came I to a place where death and pain
Had made of God's sweet world a waste forlorn,
With shattered trees and meadows gashed and torn,
Where the grim trenches scarred the shell-sheared plain.”

“His long struggle with physical passion was almost over, and, as with many other great sensualists, its place had been taken by an obsession with death.”

“We all have same beginning (BIRTH), and we will have same ending (DEATH). So how different can we be?”

“the depth of a person's character is not measured by his or her physical strength, but by the depth of his or her nobility.”

“Kunti did not know his [Karna's] fate till years later, when she was not in a position to acknowledge him as her son. The son, on his part, never forgave the mother for having abandoned him. From the minute of his birth to well after his death this child was a constant source of dread and sorrow to the mother.”

“And in this passion for understanding her soul lay close to his; she had him all to herself. But he must be made abstract first.”