I'm afraid love is just a word.

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.

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

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.

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 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.