'De nada,' replied Gregorius. The Portuguese couple sat down, the train went on. Gregorius was never to forget this scene. They were his first Portuguese words in the real world and they worked. That words could cause something in the world, make someone move or stop, laugh or cry: even as a child he had found it extraordinary and it had never stopped impressing him.

But when we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?

It wasn't only that you didn't see him anymore, meet him anymore. You saw his absence and encountered it as something tangible. His not being there was like the sharply outlined emptiness of a photo with a figure cut out precisely with scissors and now the missing figure is more important, more dominant than all others.

Sometimes, we are afraid of something because we're afraid of something else.

[Vanity] is an unrecognised form of stupidity, you have to forget the cosmic meaninglessness of all our acts to be able to be vain and that's a glaring form of stupidity.

Human beings can't bear silence.It would mean that they would bear themselves.

Life is not what we live; it is what we imagine we are living.