Harry Mulisch - The Discovery of Heaven (1992)

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Perhaps, he thought, true pure love, like all flowers, flourished best with its roots in muck and mud. Perhaps that was a law of life that held everything together.

Harry Mulisch
It was time, he thought, that tore everything to shreds.

Harry Mulisch
All human beings were of course unique, and they only discovered that when someone else fell in love with them or when no one ever fell in love with them.

Harry Mulisch
In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what—apart from the eternal innocence of animals—offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with her newly dead child on her lap.

Harry Mulisch
If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet, a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept — namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books.

Harry Mulisch
I never understood how anyone could feel small compared with the universe. After all, man knows how overwhelmingly large it is, and a few others things besides, and that means he is not small. The fact that man has discovered all this precisely proves his greatness.

Harry Mulisch
Using someone's name during a conversation was like a casual caress, like stroking their hair.

Harry Mulisch