p. 25 ... and just remember, my boy, if life works out just a tiny bit in your favor it can be beautiful, just beautiful.
p. 151 I also learned that the closest one person can be to another is through silence, an hour, then a quarter-hour, then the last few minutes of silence when the carriage has arrived, or sometimes a military britzska, or a car. Two silent people rise to their feet, gazing long at each other, a sigh, then the final kiss, then the man standing in the britzska, then the man sitting down and the vehicle driving off up the hill, the final bend in the road, the waving handkerchief.
p. 182 That was the height of my career, that was what made me a man who had not lived in vain. I began to look at my hotel as a work of art, as my own creation, because that was how others saw it, and they opened my eyes...
p. 215 ... it was a way of making fun of myself, because I was independent now and beginning to find the presence of other people irksome, and I felt that in the end I would have to speak only with myself, that my own best friend and companion would be that other self of mine, that teacher inside me with whom I was beginning to talk more and more.
p. 226 ... when I looked back on [my life, it] seemed to have happened to someone else. My life to this point seemed like a novel, a book written by a stranger even though I alone had the key to it, I alone was a witness to it, even though my life too was constantly being overgrown by grass and weeds at either end.
p. 227 And I talked in a jumbled way about how beauty had another side to it, about how this beautiful countryside, like a round loaf of bread, was all related to whether you could love even what was unpleasant and abandoned, whether you could love the landscape during all those hours and days and weeks when it rained, when it got dark early, when you sat by the stove and thought it was ten at night while it was really only half past six, when you started talking to yourself...
p. 236 And I longed to write everything down just as it was, so others could read it and from what I said to myself paint all the pictures that had been strung like beads, like a rosary, on the long thread of my life, unbelievable beads that I had managed to catch hold of here as I looked out the window and marveled at the falling snow that had half buried the cottage.
p. 239 At first the pictures were unclear and I even wrote out some that had no point to them, but then suddenly the writing began to flow, and I covered page after page while the pictures in front of my eyes went by faster than I could write, and this gap between pictures and the writing kept me awake at night.
