The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.
The novel is a meditation on existence as seen through the medium of imaginary characters.
The longing for order is at the same time a longing for death, because life is an incessant disruption of order.
For the body is temporal and thought is eternal and the shimmering essence of flame is an image of thought.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
In her presence I could dare everything: sincerity, emotion, pathos.
A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.
No one can give anyone else the gift of the idyll; only an animal can do so, because only animals were not expelled from Paradise. The love between dog and man is idyllic. It knows no conflicts, no hair-raising scenes; it knows no development.
To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn’t know how to be mortal. And when he dies, he doesn’t even know how to be dead.
It was futile to attack with reason the stout wall of irrational feelings that, as is known, is the stuff of which the female mind is made.
Facts mean little compared to attitudes. To contradict rumor or sentiment is as futile as arguing against a believer’s faith in the Immaculate Conception. You have simply become a victim of faith, Comrade Assistant.
If I hadn’t met you, I’d certainly have fallen in love with him.
But what had happened, had happened, and it was no longer possible to right anything.
Dogs do not have many advantages over people, but one of them is extremely important: euthanasia is not forbidden by law in their case; animals have the right to a merciful death.
By giving the love act a name, if only an innocent little word like, “it,” he paved the way for other words, words that would reflect physical love as in a set of mirrors.
Physical love is unthinkable without violence.
People derived too much pleasure from seeing their fellow man morally humiliated to spoil that pleasure by hearing out an explanation.
To rebel against being born a woman seemed as foolish to her as to take pride in it.
He Kept recalling her lying on his bed; she reminded him of no one in his former life.
The novel is not the author’s confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become.