The real director of our life is accident – a director full of cruelty, compassion and bewitching charm.

What else? Was this what came from thoughts of time running out and death: that all of a sudden you didn’t know anymore what you wanted? That you didn’t know your own will anymore? That you lost the obvious familiarity with your own wishes? And in this way became strange and a problem to yourself?

Sleepless people were bound by a wordless solidarity.

Getting to know a city through the books in it – he had always done that.

They aren’t texts, Gregorius. What people say aren’t texts. They simply talk.

Extortion through trust. “Patients confided the most intimate things to him, and also the most dangerous,” said Adriana. “Politically dangerous, I mean. And then they expected him to divulge something too. So they wouldn’t have to feel naked. He hated that. He hated it from the bottom of his heart. I don’t want anybody to expect anything of me, he said then and stamped his foot. And why the devil is it so hard to keep my distance?

Can God create a stone He couldn’t lift? If not, then He isn’t almighty; if yes, then He isn’t either, for now there is a stone He cannot lift.

Isn’t it true that it’s not people who meet, but rather the shadows cast by their imaginations?

So, the fear of death might be described as the fear of not being able to become whom one had planned to be.

We are stratified creatures, creatures full of abysses, with a soul of inconstant quicksilver, with a mind whose color and shape change as in a kaleidoscope that is constantly shaken.