From tender youth we are told by father and teacher that betrayal is the most heinous offence imaginable. But what is betrayal?…Betrayal means breaking ranks and breaking off into the unknown. Sabina knew of nothing more magnificent than going off into the unknown.

In the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man's body.

So she stood naked in front of the young man and at this moment stopped playing the game.

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.

She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.

We all reject out of hand the idea that the love of our life may be something light or weightless; we presume our love is what must be, that without it our life would no longer be the same; we feel that Beethoven himself, gloomy and awe-inspiring, is playing the “Es muss sein!” to our own great love.

Our dreams prove that to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs.