"Ah how shameless— the way these mortals blame the gods.
From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes,
but they themselves, with their own reckless ways,
compound their pains beyond their proper share."
"In the long view did it matter that we shared this? We were painting by numbers, starting with the greens. Because that happened to be our favourite color. And this, we figured, meant something."
"In the light of the incredible, the soul for the first time saw the body as something other than banal; for the first time it looked on the body with fascination: all the body’s matchless, inimitable, unique qualities had suddenly come to the fore. This was not the most ordinary of bodies (as the soul had regarded it until then); this was the most extraordinary body."
"In spite of their love, they had made each other’s life a hell. The fact that they loved each other was merely proof that the fault lay not in themselves, in their behavior or inconsistency of feeling, but rather in their incompatibility: he was strong and she was weak.
…But when the strong were too weak to hurt the weak, the weak had to be strong enough to leave."
"In her eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the books she took out of the municipal library, and above all, the novels… They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects; she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane for the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others."
