What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as charact… - Milan Kundera

Prijateljstvo je neophodno čovjeku za dobar rad pamćenja. Sjećati se svoje prošlosti, nositi je uza se, to je možda nužan uvjet da se sačuva, kako kažu, integritet svoga 'ja'. Da to 'ja' ne zakržlja, da sačuva svoj obujam, potrebno je zalijevati sjećanja kao cvijeće u loncu, a to zalijevanje traži stalan dodir sa svjedocima prošlosti, to jest s prijateljima. Oni su naše zrcalo; naše pamćenje; ništa ne tražimo od njih osim da s vremena na vrijeme osvjetlaju to zrcalo da bismo se u njemu mogli ogledati.

That is when I understood the magical meaning of the circle. If you go away from a row, you can still come back into it. A row is an open formation. But a circle closes up, and if you go away from it, there is no way back. It is not by chance that the planets move in circles and that a rock coming loose from one of them goes inexorably away, carried off by centrifugal force. Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not stopped falling. Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall. And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.

There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weights so heavy as the pain one feels for someone, with someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.