Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

Radio... force-feeds us music... everywhere and all the time... sewage-water music in which music is dying.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.

[W]e must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

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