But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)

When his wife was at his side, she was also in front of him, marking out the horizon of his life. Now the horizon is empty: the view has changed.

The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become

The love between dog and man is idyllic, dogs were never expelled from paradise.

We pass through the present with our eyes blindfolded. We are permitted merely to sense and guess at what we are actually experiencing. Only later when the cloth is untied can we glance at the past and find out what we have experienced and what meaning it has.

Extremism means borders beyond which life ends, and a passion for extremism, in art and in politics, is a veiled longing for death.

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.