Any intelligent person knows that life is a beautiful thing and that the purpose of life is to be happy," said my father as he watched the three beauties. "But it seems only idiots are ever happy. How can we explain this?

We don't need more museums that try to construct the historical narratives of a society, community, team, nation, state, tribe, company, or species. We all know that the ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are riches, more humane, and much more joyful.

(...) what I really hoped to find on these trips wandering the shops, the cinemas, and the museums of the Western world was an idea, an object, a painting - anything at all - that might transform and illuminate my own life.

She looked out the window; in her eyes was the light that you see only in children arriving at a new place, or in young people still open to new influences, still curious about the world because they have not yet been scarred by life.

Einstein...even failed physics once, but he'd never thought of giving up school to make a living.

What is the meaning of it all, of this...of this world?'Mystery', I heard in my thoughts, or perhaps, 'mercy', but I wasn't certain of either.

...every life is like a snowflake: individual existences might look identical from afar, but to understand one´s own eternally mysterious uniqueness one had only to plot the mysteries of one´s own snowflake.

What we learned from these painstakingly detailed miniatures was how ephemeral all those ancient lives had been, how quickly they’d all been forgotten, and how vain we were to think that we could grasp the meaning of life and history by learning a handful of facts.

Tužna projekcija života za pjesnika je primamljivija od samog života.