“He understood very well that it was just because of this intimacy that their marriage had not survived.”

“He and Onno had once come to the conclusion that you had to decide for yourself whether after your death you wanted to return to your father, then you must go into fire, because that was spirit, but your mother was of course the earth, the body.”

“I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.”

“The process of putting Haarlem behind him resembled the changes a man goes through when he divorces. He takes a girl friend to forget his wife, but just doing that prolongs the connection with the wife. Possibly things will work out only with the next girl friend - although the third one has the best chance. Boundaries have to be continuously sealed off, but it's a hopeless job, fore everything touches everything else in this world. A beginning never disappears, not even with the ending.”

“Hate is the darkness, that's no good. And yet we've got to hate Fascists, and that's considered perfectly all right. How is that possible? It's because we hate them in the name of the light, I guess, whereas they hate only in the name of darkness. We hate hate itself, and for this reason our hate is better than theirs. But that's why it's more difficult for us. For them everything is very simple, but for us it's more complicated. We've got to become a little bit like them in order to fight them so we become a little bit unlike ourselves. But they don't have that problem; they can do away with us without any qualms. We first have to do away with something inside ourselves before we can do away with them. Not them; they can simply remain themselves, that's why they're so strong. But they'll lose in the end, because they have no light in them. The only thing is, we mustn't become too much like them, mustn't destroy ourselves altogether, otherwise they'll have won in the end...”

“We underestimated human potential, both the strength of man's intellect and the weakness of his flesh, and therefore his receptivity to satanic inspiration -- but ultimately he is our creature, and so what we've really underestimated is our own creativity. What we made has turned out to be more than what we thought we had made. So ultimately in our failure there is a compliment to us: our creativity is greater than ourselves!”

“I had already taken a step toward their house, but then Father said, 'No, not there. They're hiding Jews.'"Christ!" exclaimed Anton, slapping his forehead.”