"How terribly sad it was that people are made in such a way that they get used to something as extraordinary as living."
— Jostein Gaarder (The Solitaire Mystery)

"You can never know if a person forgives you when you wrong them. Therefore it is existentially important to you. It is a question you are intensely concerned with. Neither can you know whether a person loves you. It’s something you just have to believe or hope. But these things are more important to you than the fact that the sum of the angles in a triangle is 180 degrees. You don't think about the law of cause and effect or about modes of perception when you are in the middle of your first kiss."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

"Les boutiques de fleuristes n'ont jamais de rideau de fer. Personne ne cherche à voler des fleurs."
— Boris Vian

"We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."
— Milan Kundera

"Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring--it was peace."
— Milan Kundera

"she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
— Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being)