Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.

Is not parody the eternal lot of man?

The senator had only one argument in his favour: his feeling. When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object. In the realm of kitsch, the dictatorship of the heart reigns supreme.

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.

Graphomania (a mania for writing books) inevitably takes on epidemic proportions when a society develops to the point of creating three basic conditions: - (1) an elevated level of general well being which allows people to devote themselves to useless activities (2) a high degree of social atomization and , as a consequence, a general isolation of individuals; (3) the absence of dramatic social changes in the nation's internal life.

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.