Nothing requires a greater effort of thought than arguments to justify the rule of non-thought.

The emotion of love gives all of us a misleading illusion of knowing the other.

Is a novel anything but a trap set for a hero?

Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)

There is a certain part of all of us that lives outside of time. Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.