If hatred strikes you, if you get accused, thrown to the lions, you can expect one of two reactions from people who know you: some of them will join … - Milan Kundera

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences (...) They are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif (...) Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. (...) it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in hsi daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Einmal ist keinmal, says Tomas to himself. What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.

The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.