I usually never leave the house, but we went to Australia recently—the whole family was there—it was a ridiculous place. Located three quarters of a mile from the surface of the sun, people audibly crackling as they walk past you on the street. That's why they all barbecue, you don't need to cook somewhere like that, you just bring the shit out, fling it on a grill and it bursts into flames. It's not supposed to be inhabited, and when they're not doing that, frying themselves outside, they all fling themselves into the sea, which is inhabited almost exclusively by things designed to kill you; sharks, jellyfish, swimming knives, they're all in there.

I do not like this place [ Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a small fishing-village on the Spanish border]. I find it arid and dried up. The sea here is ugly. It is either all blue - I hate it like that - or dark and dull.

“Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail."

In this large and fierce world of ours, there are many, many unpleasant places to be. You can be in a river swarming with angry electric eels, or in a supermarket filled with vicious long-distance runners. You can be in a hotel that has no room service, or you can be lost in a forest that is slowly filling up with water. You can be in a hornet's nest or in an abandoned airport or the office of a pediatric surgeon, but one of the most unpleasant things that can happen is to find yourself in a quandary. - Lemony Snicket

I would have been horrified by what I perceive in the Indo-European world. . . . To live in a trifunctional system would give me the impression of living in a prison. Therefore, I study the three functions, I explore this prison, but I would never want to have lived there. If I was visiting cannibals, I would seek to know as much as possible about them but I would stay well away from the cauldron.

You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.

In the place I’m from you don’t have much room. You have the sea. If you step on the sea, you sink. The only thing the sea can do is take you away. People living on a tiny island are not expected to have deep thoughts about how they live, their right to live. You can have little conflicts, disagreements about what side of the street to walk on, but you cannot disagree that perhaps there should not be a street there. You cannot disagree about fundamental things, which is what an artist would do. All they’re left with is a kind of pastoral beauty, a kind of natural beauty, and wonderful trinkets…

The body is a curious monster, no place to live in, how could anyone feel at home there?

The best paradise is the paradise we are exiled from.

Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

Why would I want to stay here? To hell with this place.

There are certain things - as, a spider, a ghost, The income-tax, gout, an umbrella for three - That I hate, but the thing that I hate the most Is a thing they call the Sea.

"I'm sorry! I really am! I wanted to get out of this place! I want to live! I want to get away from here and never see it again! I hate everything about it!"

"You will hate the next place, too," I said. "What you are you will carry with you."

Happiness is a prison, Evey. Happiness is the most insidious prison of all.