When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

...[P]eople who shout joy from the rooftops are often the saddest of all... (p.24)

What I need most of all is certainty.

There is such a thing as everyday, ordinary, vulgar ecstasy; the ecstasy of anger, the ecstasy of speed at the wheel, the ecstasy of ear-splitting noise, ecstasy in the soccer stadium.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.