“He didn’t think he would understand the strangeness of life if he lived to be a hundred years old.”

“There was a kid who was 16 years old, he committed a burglary, he was aggravated, but not armed. And for that he got 108 years, one-hundred-and-eight years.”

“No one is so old as to think that he cannot live one more year.”
Nemo enim est tam senex qui se annum non putet posse vivere.

“Despite everything he had or might have (except, of course, another human being), life gave no promise of improvement or even of change. The way things shaped up, he would live out his life with no more than he already had. And how many years was that? Thirty, maybe forty if he didn’t drink himself to death.
The thought of forty more years of living as he was made him shudder.”

“He lived year after year. He attended only to himself and to God and this picture-but he did not understand himself.”

“The worst of his life is not that he thinks that it is living, but that he is satisfied with it, and the most awful thing of life is that he thinks that is how it should be. He can't understand anyone who thinks differently from him, and when he can't understand anything he says: I'm sorry, but I'm only a humble joiner. It's all he can do to accept that fact that I am studying the history of literature and Scandinavian languages: he accepts it not because I will thereby become mentally enriched, but because he thinks that it will enable me to live an easier life that he. Easier but not different.”

“I thought about you all the time. I used to pray that you’d live to be a hundred years old. I didn’t know. I didn’t know that you were ashamed of me.”

“Life becomes the way it is lived; and man may live the way he wants to live when he learns to think what he wants to think.”

“His life was two lives now: the life he would have and the life he would forever wonder about.”

“I think that on the whole man would be living a more natural life if he were a vegetarian.”