“I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists. I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table manners. Yet after all why not? Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.”

“I had a feeling that I shouldn't be here listening to this sinful man who had mixed children and didn't care who knew it, but he was fascinating. I had never encountered a being who deliberately perpetrated fraud against himself. But why had he entrusted us with his deepest secret? I asked him why. 'Because you're children and you can unterstand it,' he said.”

“I have not yet lost a feeling of wonder, and of delight, that the delicate motion should reside in all the things around us, revealing itself only to him who looks for it.”

“His chin jutted forward in a rather pugnacious manner. "I should not have to explain myself to my wife.""And I should not have to ask for an explanation. Yet here we are.”

“I have many homes, some that I have not seen yet. Maybe that is why I am restless; I have not yet known all of my homes”

“So what was in this building before historical materialism?''Before what?''You know, back then, under the old regime?''Oh. Under the old regime my master lived here.''A bourgeois?''You're a bourgeois yourself! He wasn't a bourgeois. He was a marshal of the nobility.''So he was a proletarian, then?''You're a proletarian yourself! I told you loud and clear, a marshal.'The conversation with the clever dvornik with a vague understanding of the class structure of society would have lasted god knows how long if the young man hadn't made a decisive move.”