Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

... characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Today we're all alike, all of us bound together by our shared apathy toward work. That very apathy has become a passion. The one great collective passion of our time.

Tereza had gone back to sleep; he could not. He pictured her death. She was dead and having terrible nightmares; but because she was dead, he was unable to wake her from them. Yes, that is death: Tereza asleep, having terrible nightmares, and he unable to wake her.