Laziness may appear attractive, but work gives satisfaction.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

Guido clung to this thought like a drowning man clutching at a straw. He was rich and famous now, he told himself, and wasn’t that what he’d always dreamed of?

I forget very fast and want to record thus simply impress.

Those who still think listening isn’t an art should see if they can do it half as well.

Life holds one great but quite commonplace mystery. Though shared by each of us and known to all, seldom rates a second thought. That mystery, which most of us take for granted and never think...

Momo listened to everyone and everything – even to the rain and the wind and the pine trees – and all of them spoke to her after their own fashion.

Who would ever think that so much can go on in the soul of a young girl?

In their view, even leisure time had to be used to the full, so as to extract the maximum of entertainment and relaxation with the minimum of delay.

She would sit by herself in the middle of the old stoe amphitheatre, with the sky’s starry vault overhead, and simply listen to the great silence around her.

I must uphold my ideals, for perhaps the time will come when I shall be able to carry them out.

Time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart.

A subject which at first glance seems quite removed from the undeclared concern of the book can encapsulate that concern.

I keep my ideals, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving...

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don’t trust yourself, either in your first...

I soothe my conscience now with the thought that it is better for hard words to be on paper than that Mummy should carry them in her heart.

She became so important to them that they wondered how they had ever managed without her in the past. And the longer she stayed with them the more indispensable she became, so indispensable in fact...

People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.

And finally I twist my heart round again, so that the bad is on the outside and the good is on the inside, and keep on trying to find a way of becoming what I...

When it comes to controlling human beings, there is no better instrument than lies. Because you see, humans live by beliefs. And beliefs can be manipulated. The power to manipulate beliefs is the only thing...

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart.

The odd thing was that, no matter how much time he saved, he never had any to spare; in some mysterious way, it simply vanished.

I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.

Calendars and clocks exist to measure time, but that signifies little because we all know that an hour can seem as eternity or pass in a flash, according to how we spend it.

Whoever is happy will make others happy too.

All the beasts in Howling Forest were safe in their caves, nests, and burrows.