“Living, there is no happiness in that. Living: carrying one’s painful self through the world.But being, being is happiness. Being: Becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like warm rain.”

“Living is being happy: seeing, hearing, touching, drinking, eating, urinating, defecating, diving into the water and gazing at the sky, laughing and crying.”

“to have compassion (co-feeling) means not only to be able to live with other's misfortune but also to feel with him any emotion -joy , anxiety, happiness, pain”

“The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness, "that delectable trance of happiness, that ultimate peak of delight. Laughter of delight, delight of laughter." There is no doubt: this laughter goes "far beyond joking, jeering, and ridicule." The two sisters stretched out on their bed are not laughing at anything concrete, their laughter has no object; it is an expression of being rejoicing at being... and in this ecstatic laughter he loses all memory, all desire, cries out to the immediate present of the world, and needs no other knowledge.”

“She knew she was being unfair...; she knew she was acting like the most vulgar of women, the kind that is out to cause pain and knows how.”

“The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant. What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?”

“All novels . . . are concerned with the enigma of the self. As soon as you create an imaginary being, a character, you are automatically confronted by the question: what is the self? How can it be grasped?”