People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself

I want you to be weak. As weak as I am.

Living for Sabina meant seeing. Seeing is limited by two borders: strong light, which blinds, and total darkness. Perhaps that was what motivated Sabina's distaste for all extremism. Extremes mean borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.

Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.