The certainty that someone will never come back," the narrator muses of the dead, "never speak again, never take another step…will never look at us or look away. I don't know how we bear it, or how we recover.

Gondolom, hogy neki is szüksége volt ellenségre, akit okolhat a nyomoráért. Ahogy egyébként bárki másnak, a szegényeknek, a középosztálybelieknek, a jómódúaknak és a peremre szorultaknak is. Senki sem képes elfogadni, hogy a dolgok néha úgy történnek, hogy senki sem felelős értük; hogy létezik balsors, hogy az emberek kifordulnak magukból, elvesznek, és maguknak keresik a szerencsétlenséget és az összeomlást.

Senki sem törődhet bele, hogy örökre tönkretették az életét.

He must have been one of those men who doesn't really notice such things and leaves it to others to sort out any awkwardness or imperfections. This is not because they are thoughtless or because they consider themselves too high and might, it's simply that their brains don't register these practicalities or the world around them.

The bad thing about terrible misfortunes, the kind that tear us apart and appear to be unendurable, is that those who suffer them believe or almost demand that the world should end right there, and yet the world pays no heed and carries on regardless and even tugs at the sleeve of the person who suffered the misfortune, I mean, it won’t just let them depart this world the way a disgruntled spectator might leave the theatre, unless the unfortunate person kills him or herself.

When you don’t know what to believe, when you’re not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands of the truth or of the whole tangled mess—which comes to the same thing. The truth is never clear, it’s always a tangled mess. Even when you get to the bottom of it. But in real life almost no one needs to find the truth or devote himself to investigating anything, that only happens in puerile novels.