“The common prejudice that love is as common as "romance" may be due to the fact that we all learned about it first through poetry. But the poets fool us; they are the only ones to whom love is not ...”

“I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circums...”

“the world and the people who inhabit it are not the same. The world lies between people, and this in-between much more than (as is often thought) men or even man is today the object of the greate...”

“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could ...”

“We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.”

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interestforces that look like sh...”

“The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries ("museums"), and not yourselves, are full.”

“We are now in the mountains and they are in us, kindling enthusiasm, making every nerve quiver, filling every pore and cell of us.”

“The living sinners on deadly ground.”

“Seek a slower, simpler life.”

“There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn't Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect sel...”

“Talking won't change it. But sometimes it was what she wanted most, to tell someone; often, though, she just wanted to escape those horrid feelings, to escape herself, so there was no pain, no fear...”

“The only failure is not to try.”

“We decided to try in vitro, because both Peter and I felt we couldn't handle another failure. When I miscarried after that, we had to come to terms with the possibility that this wasn't meant to be.”

“I try to be cool with everybody, but sometimes, everybody just has different personalities, motives, and different characters.”