Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.

Besides, whoever keeps the future in front of him and the past at his back is doing something else that's hard to imagine. For the image implies that events somehow already exist in the future, reach the present at a determined moment, and finally come to rest in the past. But nothing exists in the future; it is empty; one might die at any minute. Therefore such a person has his face toward the void, whereas it is the past behind him that is visible, stored in the memory.

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

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.

All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?