If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

The distribution of tasks among the various employees follows a simple rule, which is that the duty of the members of each category is to do as much work as they possibly can, so that only a small part of that work need be passed to the category above. This means that the clerks are obliged to work without cease from morning to night, whereas the senior clerks do so only now and then, the deputies very rarely, and the Registrar almost never.

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

One cannot be too careful with words, they change their minds just as people do.

...sometimes we ask ourselves why happiness took so long to arrive, why it didn't come sooner, but appears suddenly, as now, when we've given up hope of it ever arriving, it's likely then that we won't know what to do, and rather than it being a question of choosing between laughter and tears, we will be filled by a secret anxiety to which we might not know how to respond at all.

Perhaps only in a world of the blind will things be what they truly are.

One can show no greater respect than to weep for a stranger.