it is wrong to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences... but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life a dimension of beauty.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

The psychological and physiological mechanism of love is so complex that at a certain period in his life a young man must concentrate all his energy on coming to grips with it, and in this way he misses the actual content of the love: the woman he loves. (In this he is much like a young violinist who cannot concentrate on the emotional content of a piece until the technique required to play it comes automatically.)

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)