It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Art is interested in life at the moment when the ray of power is passing through it.

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

And why is it, thought Lara, that my fate is to see everything and take it all so much to heart?

How many things in the world deserve our loyalty? Very few indeed. I think one should be loyal to immortality, which is another word for life, a stronger word for it.

You and I are like the first two people on earth who at the beginning of the world had nothing to cover themselves with - at the end of it, you and I are just as stripped and homeless. And you and I are the last remembrance of all that immeasurable greatness which has been created in all the thousands of years between their time and ours, and it is in memory of all that vanished splendour that we live and love and weep and cling to one another.

What is laid down, ordered, factual is never enough to embrace the whole truth: life always spills over the rim of every cup.