“...Life is nothing but trading smells.”

“...and every Wednesday the perfumed young lady slips me a hundred-crown note to leave her alone with the convict. And by Thursday the hundred crowns are already gone in so much beer. And when the visiting hour is over, the young lady comes out with the stink of jail in her elegant clothes; and the prisoner goes back to his cell with the lady's perfume in his jailbird's suit. And I'm left with the smell of beer. Life is nothing but trading smells.”

“Each new Clarice, compact as a living body with its smells and its breath, shows off, like a gem, what remains of the ancient Clarices, fragmentary and dead.”

“And, thinking of this judgment I would no longer be able to change, I suddenly felt a kind of relief, as if peace could come to me only after the moment when there would be nothing to add and nothing to remove in that arbitrary ledger of misunderstandings, and the galaxies which were gradually reduced to the last tail of the last luminous ray, winding from the sphere of darkness, seemed to bring with them the only possible truth about myself, and I couldn’t wait until all of them, one after the other, had followed this path.”

“A person's life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous onesbut because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but, rather, corresponds to an inner architecture.”

“Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.”

“The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”