The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

lonely people hoping to be taken to the police station from time to time for an interrogation that will enable them to talk about themselves

We write books because our children aren't interested in us. We address ourselves to an anonymous world because our wives plug their ears when we speak to them.

An old tree is no less beautiful than a young one, and a sick lion is still king of the beasts. Human ugliness is the ugliness of clothes

She was in fact much more natural naked than dressed, as if in rejecting her clothes she was also rejecting the difficult condition of woman-hood in order to become simply a human being, with-out sexual characteristics

why the salty fluid that trickles from our eyes is sublimely poetic

laughter was as sacrilegious here as it is in church when the priest is elevating the host.

They all had to live through the horrifying battle against laughter.

Repetition is only one of the ways of making the border visible. The borderline is covered with dust, and repetition is like a hand whisking away dust

kept them prepared to die for something they did not care about.

In my opinion, however, Jan is mistaken in thinking that the border is a line that crosses a man's life at a specific point, that it marks a break in time, a particular second on the clock of a human life. No. I am certain, on the contrary, that the border is constantly with us, irrespective of time and our stage of life, that it is omnipresent, even though circumstances might make it more or less visible.