I know that they're all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don't understand that it's really their own self that they're mad at.

Don't let the cat out or the concierge in: this is the first principle of socialist ladies.

A man who farts in bed . . . is a man who loves life.

Beauty consists of its own passing, just as we reach for it. It’s the ephemeral configuration of things in the moment, when you see both their beauty and their death. ...Does this mean that this is how we must live our lives? Constantly poised between beauty and death, between movement and its disappearance? Maybe that’s what being alive is all about: so we can track down those moments that are dying.

As always, I am saved by the inability of living creatures to believe anything that might cause the walls of their little mental assumptions to crumble.

We never look beyond our assumptions and what's worse, we have given up trying to meet others; we just meet ourselves.

Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvellously foreign to the striving of the will.