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

Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

You think that just because it's already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multicolored taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.

Looking out over the courtyard at the dirty walls, he realized he had no idea whether it was hysteria or love.

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

I have a strong will to love you for eternity.

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.