There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.

But man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not.

Existential mathematics...) the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.

For a novelist, a given historic situation is an anthropologic laboratory in which he explores his basic question: What is human existence?

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life.

She wants to have her notebooks so that the flimsy framework of events, as she has constructed them in her school notebook, will be provided with walls and become a house she can live in. Because if the tottering structure of her memories collapses like a clumsily pitched tent, all that Tamina will be left with is the present, that invisible point, that nothingness moving slowly toward death.

Men grow old, the end draws near, each moment becomes more and more valuable, and there is no time to waste over recollections.

If we only have one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

People are always shouting they want to create a better future. It's not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all.

One day we'll be glad to have the pictures...

What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have hap-pened at all. If we have only one life to live,we might as well not have lived at all.