It usually takes me some time to warm up to any book - I don't like them for awhile before I figure them out. This one actually started amazingly for me - frictionless flow of words into my brain. I sort of lost the train of it after a while, but I still enjoyed it and think I could stand to read it again some day.

Just a few bullet notes for myself below.

Parmenides - 5, 33
einmal ist keinmal - 8, 34, 39, 223
Beethoven es muss sein - 32-33, 49, 193ff
title line - 122, later again

"man, because he has only one life to live, cannot conduct experiments to test whether to follow his passion (compassion) or not" - 34

variation vs routine: "Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute" - 48

"human lives are composed ... They are composed like music" - 52

"to imagine - to dream about things that have not happened - is among mankind's deepest needs - 59

"She [Sabina] would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison" - 100

"A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence" - 139

What was Tomas after in bedding so many women? "When he saw a woman in her clothes, he could naturally imagine more or les what she would look like naked ... but between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest" - 199