“People only get married when they've no other option, out of panic or desperation or so as not to lose someone they couldn't bear to lose. It's always the most conventional things that contain the ...”

“...and yet the idea is hard to accept, it's so hard to succeed in making something happen, even what's been decided on and planned out, not even the will of a god seems forceful enough to manage it...”

“We lose everything because everything remains except us. And therefore any form of posterity may be an affront, and perhaps any memory, as well.”

“We do tend to believe things while we're hearing or reading them. Afterwards, it's another matter, when the book is closed and the voice stops speaking.”

“Fiction has the ability to show us what we dont know and what doesnt happen.”

“When you dont know what to believe, when youre not prepared to play the amateur detective, then you get tired and dismiss the entire business, you let it go, you stop thinking and wash your hands o...”

“You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race.”

“They say that patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and then they make you king.”

“A regime that wraps itself in the flag of truth fears truth most of all, for if its story is falsified to the slightest degree, its authority is gone.”

“War always reaches the depths of horror because of idiots who perpetuate terror from generation to generation under the pretext of vengeance.”

“No time to spare: the expression assumed its full significance, as so many expressions do in wartime.”

“This time we'll be fighting for the nation. The company commander says that it's better to be the ghost of a fallen soldier than a nationless slave. For the sake of our fellow countrymen, our famil...”