“If only we could all escape from this house of incest, where we only love ourselves in the other, if only I could save you all from yourselves.”

“I see the whole episode in my memory as if it were a very crisply photographed black and white movie. Directed by Bergman perhaps. We are playing ourselves in the movie version. If only we could escape from always having to play ourselves!”

“I could never kill myself. What if it doesn't work. Then I'll have failed at the only thing that could save me from my failures. Where do you go from there?”

“If only Africa had more mosquito nets then every year we could save millions of mosquitoes from dying needlessly of aids.”

“I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.”

“… In the summer New York was the only place in which one could escape from New Yorkers…”

“In darkness is where we truly find ourselves, in light we only find others and in others you cannot find yourself.”

“Books were this wonderful escape for me because I could open a book and disappear into it, and that was the only way out of that house when I was a kid.”

“Fathers are the geniuses of the house because only a person as intelligent as we could fake such stupidity.”

“Today, with the weapons of mass destruction at man’s disposal, the human race itself is in imminent danger of being destroyed. It is a far cry from vegetarianism to atomic or hydrogen bomb, but if you look at it, there is no escape from vegetarianism ultimately if we want to escape from the hydrogen bomb. Any integrated view of life as a whole will reveal to us the connection between the individual’s food and his behaviour towards others, and through a process of ratiocination which is not fantastic, we cannot but arrive at the conclusion that the only means of escaping the hydrogen bomb is to escape the mentality which has produced it, and the only way to escape that mentality is to cultivate respect for all life, life in all forms, under all conditions. It is only another name for vegetarianism.”