This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

The eye... the point where a person's identity is concentrated.

Two people in love, alone, isolated from the world, that's beautiful.

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

People fascinated by the idea of progress never suspect that every step forward is also a step on the way to the end.

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.

She is sadder and sadder, and for a man there is no balm more soothing than the sadness he has caused a woman.