And therein lies the whole of man's plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.

Any new possibility that existence acquires, even the least likely, transforms everything about existence.

The novel is a territory where one does not make assertions; it is a territory of play and of hypotheses.

The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a film.

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.