A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

All human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them.

Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together.

A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

That question is too good to spoil with an answer.

But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute.

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.