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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

I'm afraid love is just a word.