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Telling a story is like sowing a seed—you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies. (p122)

He warned me that trade would open the door to greed and greed was an inconsiderate guest; it would bring its evil relations with it. (p58)

There was sadness in her, of course, but she didn't wish to crack like fine china either. She could not wither away. In the world of the living, one must live. And had this not been her wish? To live. Truly live.

I had been pushed further and further into a fate from which no escape or reprieve seemed possible. And so there came a moment when I stopped struggling, when I decided that I would cease making any more plans to return to the old days. I made up my mind to look upon the present as exactly what it was: it was all I had. (p232)

Nothing new has ever happened to a son of Adam, she said. Everything has already been lived and everything has already been told. If only we listened to the stories. (p52)

Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn't have them, it's our duty to invent them. ("Sweet Diamond Dust")

We are all inseparable from our times, whether we realize it or not.

Treat a child like a witch and you’ll have one.

What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no "what happened", there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.

My father was always a stranger to me, he will say. I knew him through his questions, not his answers.

She does not want to remember but she is here and memory is gathering bones.

At such moments the voice of reason always sounds like blasphemy and dissenters are of the devil.