1970:

Nevertheless progress was being made, despite all the constant impediments of one kind and another, including being negatively impeded, by omission; omission, in fact, is more decisive than its opposite. To do something by not doing it, he is supposed to have said. For example, not to do something that could be done and about which they say (on all sides!) that it must be done, was a kind of progress. It’s maddening, he is supposed to have said, but I do not permit myself to go insane. (p.73)

Words were made to demean thought, he would even go so far as to state that words exist in order to abolish thought, and one day they will succeed one hundred percent in so doing. (p.128)

There are plenty of people who think they can save themselves by filling their heads with fantasies, Konrad said to Fro, but no one can be saved, which means that no head can be saved, because where there is a head, it is already irredeemably lost, there are in fact none but lost heads on none but lost bodies populating none but lost continents, Konrad is supposed to have told Fro. (p.151)

What she did not say, though he could read it in her face, was that he had become, instead of all that, nothing at all, a mere madman. (p.163)

…as he explained to Weiser: precisely because I can see clearly that i can begin to write at any moment, that everything is arranged and in perfect order for starting to write, everything is pointing towards this moment of readiness to write, the very awareness that everything is pushing me in that direction makes it impossible for me to start writing. Every time it occurs to him that the very sight of his desk with everything on it prepared and ready, so that he can begin to write his book, is just what makes it impossible to begin writing, the thought that this is so becomes unbearable, so he gets up and drinks a glass of water. He immediately follows this up with a second glass of water swallowed in one long gulp, though in the midst of this gulp he is already thinking whether he isn’t going to catch a terrible cold from drinking the ice-cold water down so fast, because it’s a fact that drinking a glass of icy water down too fast one is bound to catch cold, which he always lived in fear of doing, but, on the other hand he had never actually caught a cold that way. Just one week before he shot his wife, however, he did say that it suddenly came to him that he had caught cold by drinking down a glass of cold water too quickly. (p.235)