“Somehow however just knowing that I could fully expect unhappiness to return – if not predictably then nevertheless reliably – was strangely liberating. The point was that even chaos had a structure a beginning and eventually an end. It was possible to live through it. I’d been doing as much for twenty years.”

“There are books, that one has for twenty years without reading them, that one always keeps at hand, that one takes along from city to city, from country to country, carefully packed, even when there is very little room, and perhaps one leafs through them while removing them from a trunk; yet one carefully refrains from reading even a complete sentence. Then after twenty years, there comes a moment when suddenly, as though under a high compulsion, one cannot help taking in such a book from beginning to end, at one sitting: it is like a revelation. Now one knows why one made such a fuss about it. It had to be with one for a long time; it had to travel; it had to occupy space; it had to be a burden; and now it has reached the goal of its voyage, now it reveals itself, now it illuminates the twenty bygone years it mutely lived with one. It could not say so much if it had not been there mutely the whole time, and what idiot would dare to assert that the same things had always been in it.”

“How do you even begin to return to someone, much less convince them to do the same for you? I had no idea. More than ever, though, right then I had to believe the answer would just come to me.”

“I had affairs with a few girls of my own age, and they taught me that no girl, however intelligent and war-hearted, can possibly know or feel half as much at twenty as she will at thirty-five.”

“For twenty years it seemed to me that I had been taking part in a game, and that one day, at the stroke of midnight, I would return to the land of shadows. ...In a little while, the hands would be pointing to midnight; they would point to midnight tomorrow and the next day, and I would still be here.”

“I know this is insane, but I somehow wish I had been in Auschwitz with my parents so I could really know what they lived through! I guess it's some kind of guilt about having had an easier life than they did.”