“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside.”

“Look to your heart
that flutters in and out like a moth.
God is not indifferent to your need.
You have a thousand prayers
but God has one.”

“All craftsmen share a knowledge. They have held
Reality down fluttering to a bench.”

“Like seeing a photograph of yourself as a child, encountering handwriting that you know was once yours but that now seems only dimly familiar can inspire a confrontation with the mystery of time.”

“From the time I was little, I always felt like an outsider. I always felt nervous and uncomfortable with myself.”

“I stepped back and all I saw was rain through windowpanes that looked like melting silver.”

“Like a moth to a flame
Burned by the fire.
My love is blind
Can't you see my desire?”

“I need you like - like light. You're light, all right - like a flame to a moth. I told you once that you shouldn't mess with forbidden things - I should have taken my own advice.”

“Rainer [protagonist in the novel], who is reading The Outsider by Camus, says he would like to put the hostility of the world behind him. Once your hope for something better is taken from you, then at last you have the present all in your hand. Then you yourself are reality. Others are extras. When Rainer contemplated san evening he says that evening is melancholy ceasefire where all life has come to and end.”

“Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.”