In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die.

This must be what it means to be a ghost, being certain that life exists, because your four senses say so, and yet unable to see it.

Dignity has no price ... when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning.

Words that come from the heart are never spoken, they get caught in the throat and can only be read in ones's eyes.

Unlike Joseph her husband, Mary is neither upright nor pious, but she is not blame for this, the blame lies with the language she speaks if not with the men who invented it, because that language has no feminine form for the words upright and pious.

It is strange how the elderly fall silent when they ought to go on speaking, obliging the young to learn everything from scratch.

People might ask me, What do you propose instead? I propose nothing. I am a mere novelist, I just write about the world as I see it. It is not my job to transform it. I cannot transform it all by myself, and I wouldn't even know how to. I limit myself to saying what I believe the world to be.