“To laugh is to live profoundly.”

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

“This reconciliation with Hitler reveals the profound moral perversity of a world that rests essentially on the nonexistence of return, for in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted.”

“[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.”

“But I'm not dead!" Tereza cried. "I can still feel!""So can we," the corpses laughed.”

“If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”

“Because to live in a world in which no one is forgiven, where all are irredeemable, is the same as living in hell.”