Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said. Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.

Draw a line; draw a line that pleases you. And remember that it is not the artist's role to copy the outlines of things but to create a world of his own lines on paper." (pp.28-29)

The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.

The phrase "It's absolutely the same with me, I..." seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other's thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy's ear by force. Because all of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.

Humanity's true moral test, its fundamental test…consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals.

Yes, the essence of every love is a child, and it makes no difference at all whether it has ever actually been conceived or born. In the algebra of love a child is the symbol of the magical sum of two beings.

"Pick me up," is the message of a person who keeps falling. Tomas kept picking her up, patiently.