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

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

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

How goodness heightens beauty!

Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories - and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself.

The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echos.