As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

There is something peculiarly dispriting about the emptiness that wells up when, in a strange city, one dials the same telephone numbers in vain.

Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.

No one can explain exactly what happens within us when the doors behind which our childhood terrors lurk are flung open.

I wonder now whether inner coldness and desolation may not be the pre-condition for making the world believe, by a kind of fraudulent showmanship, that one's own wretched heart is still aglow.

By all means be experimental, but let the reader be part of the experiment