"Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present . . . that nothingness moving slowly toward death."
"He had always been sad like this, or better lacking in gaiety, like certain lakes whose waters mirror a very high mountain that blocks the light of the sun, making them black and melancholy."
"Eventually we come to know and understand a lot of things, but it’s too late because a whole life has been determined at a stage when we didn’t know a thing."
"The basis of the self is not thought but suffering, which is the most fundamental of all feelings. While it suffers, not even a cat can doubt its unique and uninterchangeable self."
"There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces."
