It amazes me how a person to whom literature means anything can take it up as an object of study. - Elias Canetti

People sit together, bare their teeth and eat and, even in this critical moment, feel no desire to eat each other. They respect themselves for this, and respect their companions for an abstemiousness equal to their own.

One needs time to free oneself of wrong convictions. If it happens too suddenly, they go on festering.

The hallucinations of alcoholics provide us with an opportunity to study crowds as they appear in the minds of individuals.