He closed his eyes and dreamed. He closed his eyes as he had closed them on Sabina’s body in fifteen European hotels and one in America.

But whenever a single political movement corners power, we find ourselves in the realm of totalitarian kitsch.

the Russian invasion was not only a tragedy; it was a carnival of hate filled with a curious (and no longer explicable) euphoria.

He became aware of his failure some years later, on approximately the tenth day after his country was occupied by Russian tanks. It was August 1968,

She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.

If at that moment the man in the inner room had addressed her soul, she would have burst out crying and fallen into his arms.

Necessity knows no magic formulae—they are all left to chance.

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example.

What is unique about the “I” hides itself exactly in what is unimaginable about a person.