“I am still there, at that distant place in time, I never left it, but live expanded in the past, or out of it.”

“Because the one who wishes it – isn’t the one who, still untouched by the future, stands at the crossroads. Instead, it is the one marked by the future become past who wants to go back to the past, to revoke the irrevocable. And would he want to revoke it if he hadn’t suffered it?”

“To live for the moment: it sounds so right and so beautiful. But the more I want to, the less I understand what it means.”

“But when we set out to understand somebody’s inside? Is that a trip that ever ends? Is the soul a place of facts? Or are the alleged facts only the deceptive shadows of our stories?”

“...the dreamlike, bombastic wish to stand once again at that point in my life and be able to take a completely different direction than the one that has made me who I am now... To sit once more on the warm moss and hold the cap - it's the absurd wish to go back behind myself in time and take myself - the only marked by events - along on this journey.”

“I would not like to live in a world without cathedrals. I need their beauty and grandeur. I need their imperious silence. I need it against the witless bellowing of the barracks yard and the witty chatter of the yes-men. I want to hear the rustling of the organ, this deluge of ethereal notes. I need it against the shrill farce of marches.”

“Think that you have to die someday, maybe this morning.” “I think of it all the time, and so I play hooky from the office and let myself bask in the sun.”