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

Necessity knows no magic formulae-they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.

Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress.

I have no mission. No one has.

The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.

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.)

The worth of a human being lies in the ability to extend oneself, to go outside oneself, to exist in and for other people.