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The creation of robots was looked upon as the prime example of the overweening arrogance of humanity, of its attempt to take on, through misdirected science, the mantle of the divine.

Memory is not an act of will, after all. It is something that happens in spite of oneself, and when too much is changing all the time, the brain is bound to falter, things are bound to slip through it.

it’s not just that things vanish—but once they vanish, the memory of them vanishes as well. Dark areas form in th brain, and unless you make a constant effort to summon up the things that are gone, they will quickly be lost to you forever. (...) A thing vanishes, and if you wait to long before thinking about it, no amount of struggle can ever wrench it back.

If to respect himself Kimoe had to consider half the human race as inferior to him, how then did women manage to respect themselves—did they consider men inferior? And how did all that affect their sex lives?

In spite of what u would suppose, the facts are not reversible. Just because u were able to get in, that does not mean u will be able to get out. Entrances do not become exits, and there is nothing to guarantee that the door u walked through a moment ago will still be there when you turn around to look for it again. Every time you think you know the answer to a question, you discover that the question makes no sense.

I was only trying to delay the moment of reckoning. Life can be so wonderful, after all, even in times like these. It’s a pity that some people think only of spoiling it.

Yes, there are many things I’m ashamed of. At times my life seems nothing but a series of regrets, of wrong turnings, of irreversible mistakes. That is the problem when you begin to look back. You see yourself as you were, and you are appalled.

The story starts and stops, goes forward and then loses itself, and between each word, what silences, what words escape and vanish, never to be seen again.

Perhaps that is the most interesting question of all: to see what happens when there is nothing, and whether or not we will survive that too.

What strikes me as odd is not that everything is falling apart, but that so much continues to be there. It takes a long time for a world to vanish, much longer than you would think. Lives continue to be lived, and each one of us remains the witness of his own little drama.

Your mind seems to balk at forming the words, you somehow cannot bring yourself to do it. (...) That is what I mean by being wounded: you cannot merely see, for each thing somehow belongs to you. It would be good, I suppose, to make yourself so hard that nothing could affect you anymore. But then you would be alone, so totally cut off from everybody else that life would become impossible.

when hope disappears, when you find that you have given up hoping even for the possibility of hope, you tend to fill the empty spaces with dreams, little childlike thoughts and stories to keep yourself going. Even the most hardened people have trouble stopping themselves.

The essential is not to become inured. For habits are deadly. Even if it is for the hundredth time, you must encounter each thing as if you have never known it before. No matter how many times, it must always be the first time.

sarcasm never touched Elisabeth: she was, despite the subtleties her soulful appearance promised, too literal a person.

she became what he’d wanted, the one person in the world—to whom, as he’d described it, everything can be said. But when everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say. He sat beside her bed, content to be there and not expecting to be entertained.

A man who does not dream is like a man who doesn’t sweat: he stores up a lot of poison.

No matter what passions compose them, all private worlds are good, they are never vulgar places

when I loved those love collected inside me so that it went flying about like a bird in a sunflower field. But it’s best not to show such things, it burdens people and makes them, I don’t know why, unhappy.

love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life

What one says hardly matters, only the trust with which it is said, the sympathy with which it is received.

the energy we spend hiding from one another, afraid as we are of being identified. (…)
By scraps and bits I’ve in the past surrendered myself to strangers—men who disappeared down the gangplank, got off at the next station: put together, maybe they would’ve made the one person in the world—but there he is with a dozen faces down a hundred separate streets.

she was to him what no one person has been to me, the one person in the world—from whom nothing is held back.

a spirit, someone not to be calculated by the eye alone. Spirits are accepters of life, they grant its differences—and consequently are always in trouble.

the wind is us—it gathers and remembers all our voices, then sends them talking and telling through the leaves and the fields

Bit by bit, the city robs you of certainty. There can never be any fixed path, and you can survive only if nothing is necessary to you. Without warning, you must be able to change, to drop what you are doing, to reverse. In the end, there is nothing that is not the case.

I felt certain that if the world would stop indulging wars and famines and other perils, it would still be possible for human beings to embarrass each other to death. Our self-destruction might take a little longer that way, but I believed it would be no less complete.

“we aren’t eccentric, we’re not bizarre. To each other,” Franny would say, “we’re as common as rain.” And she was right: to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family. In a family, even exaggerations make perfect sense; they are always logical exaggerations, nothing more.

Thus the family maxim was that an unhappy ending did not undermine a rich and energetic life. This was based on the belief that there were no happy endings.

The way the world worked was not cause for some sort of blanket cynicism or sophomoric despair; (…) the way the world worked—which was badly—was just a strong-incentive to live purposefully, and to be determined about living well.

In this world, (…) just when you are trying to think of yourself as memorable, there is always someone who forgets that they’ve met you.