All human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them.

I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.

All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?

But nothing exists in the future it is empty one might die at any minute.

A man who has never been hungry may possess a more refined palate, but he has no idea what it means to eat.

If you find life absurd, shouldn’t you find death precisely meaningful?

Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together.

I'm afraid love is just a word.