She was experiencing the same odd happiness and odd sadness as then. The sadness meant: We are at the last station. The happiness meant: We are together. The sadness was form, the happiness content. Happiness filled the space of sadness.

He was no longer quite sure whether anything he had ever thought or felt was truly his own property, or whether his thoughts were merely a common part of the world’s store of ideas which had always existed ready-made and which people only borrowed, like books from a library.

In Tereza's eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood

What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered, conquered.

Young is the one that plunges in the future and never looks back.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.