“History, the way the teachers liked it, was a racetrack, a straight shot from start to finish line; life itself was more of a maze.”

“Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.”

“Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster towards a finishing line that is merely the start of the next race.”

“The materialists say, it is by means of a series of straight lines more or less perfect that one imagines the perfect straight line as an ideal limit. That is right, but the progression in itself necessarily contains what is infinite; it is in relation to the perfect straight line that one can say that such and such a straight line is less twisted than some other. … Either one conceives the infinite or one does not conceive at all.”

“I realize something. That wasn't a finish line for me… This is my new starting line.”

“Nothing shows you the straight line from here to death like a list.”

“Silence, much more powerful than before, much more shot through with the meaning of life and the accumulated wisdom of history.”

“Never start from zero. Always start from where the greatest have finished. Your starting point should be the finishing point of the others.”

“The at-home mother's life: it was a race with no finish line.”

“Everything in life that deviates from the straight and, so to speak, normal line, makes people first curious and then indignant.”