Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

Man reckons with immortality, and forgets to reckon with death.

Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.

Only from the perspective of such a utopia is it possible to use the concepts of pessimism and optimism with full justification: an optimist is someone who thinks that on planet number five the history of mankind will be less bloody. A pessimist is one who thinks otherwise.

Joking is a barrier between man and the world. Joking is the enemy of love and poetry.

I cannot hate them because nothing binds me to them; I have nothing in common with them.