Identity:
- “while everyone may covet the erotic life, everyone also hates it, as the source of their troubles, their frustrations, their yearnings, their complexes, their sufferings.” p. 51
- “‘Look, it’s not that they hate each other. Or that apathy has replaced love. You can’t measure the mutual affection of two human beings by the number of words they exchange. It’s just that their heads are empty. It might even be out of tact that they’re refusing to talk, if they’ve got nothing to say.'” p. 78
- “Behind all these questions, there is one thing he’s sure of: he does not understand her. For that matter, she hasn’t understood anything either. Their ideas have gone in different directions, and it seems to him they will never converge again.” p. 128
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
- “Always on his way to arrange or discuss something somewhere, he had come to think of space as a negative value, a waste of time, an obstacle to his progress.” p. 20
- “Novels [writing them] are the fruit of the human illusion that we can understand our fellow man. But what do we know about each other?” p. 89