“Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.”

“Thanatos, der alles wusste, stieg in Erwartung des Kommenden die Niederenslinger Hügel hinauf zum Plateau, suchte einen Baumstrunk, setzte sich und wartete. Er trug einen schwarzen Aktenkoffer bei sich, der alle Geduld der Welt enthielt.”

“I like photographing women who appear to know something of life. I recently did a session with a great beauty, a movie star in in her thirties. I photographed her twice within three weeks and the second time I said: "You're much more beautiful today than you were three weeks ago." And she replied: "But I'm also three weeks older.”

“At some point during the summer of 1944 she started wearing two plaits instead of one, and sometimes wore her hair loose. It was … indescribable. That hair, a dark firefall, a molten mass, I would have given everything—everything!—to run my fingers through it, to have a taste of the girl, nothing else was important, you could have shown me thousands of similar creatures or even brought them to me, she was the one I wanted, no one else, only her, and wholly, entirely, with everything.And yet: my love could have lighted on any girl, on any one of all the pretty girls this side of death.”

“Die Kirche muss erkennen, dass sich die Erde weiter dreht. Nachdem wir es immerhin geschafft haben, zu akzeptieren, dass sie sich überhaupt dreht”

“Er verhehlte auch nie sein Desinteresse an etwas, gehörte zu denen, deren Nähe man nicht sucht, deren Fremdheit zugleich dauerirritiert.”

“The utopian desire for an egalitarian society cannot, however, have sprung from any other motive than that of an inability to come to terms with one’s own envy, and/or with the supposed envy of one’s less well-off fellow men. It must be obvious how such a man, even if only prompted by his unconscious, would carefully evade the phenomenon of envy or try to belittle it!”