Those boobs of yours are ubiquitous - like God!

The novelist's ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what they did not see, say what they did not say.

But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.

I have no mission. No one has.

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Merely by being born intelligent, you right away find yourself in absolute exile.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.