"I am the man who has most felt the stupefying confusion of his speech in its relations with thought. I am the man who has most accurately charted the moment of his most intimate, his most imperceptible lapses. I lose myself in my thought, actually, the way one dreams, the way one suddenly slips back into one’s thought. I am the man who knows the inmost recesses of loss."

"‘It’s just as I say. I’m awkward, I’m clumsy, I’ve taken endless trouble to give myself more grace. I had delicacy in my heart, but not in my hands.’
‘You pretended to be clumsy to be funny, but you did it on purpose.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong: I felt clumsy so I tried to make it funny. But I have never been able to resign myself to succeeding only as a clown.’
‘But you’re only like that when you’re at low ebb.’
‘My life is just one low ebb.’
‘But what would you have liked to do?’
‘I should have liked to captivate people, to hold them, to attach them to me. To stop things moving around me. But everything has always slipped away."

"It no longer makes me cry and die and tear myself to see her go because everything goes away from me like that now—girls, visions, anything, just in the same way and forever and I accept lostness forever."

"The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss—an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.—is sure to be noticed."