In Broch, it is continuity neither of action nor of biography that provides the unity of the whole. It is something else, something less apparent, less apprehensible, something hidden: the continuity of one theme.
The uniform is what which we do not choose, that which is assigned us: the certitude of the universal as agains the precariousness of the individual. When the values that were once so solid come under challenge and withdraw, heads bowed, he who cannot live without them (without fidelity, family, country, discipline, without love) buttons himself up in the universality of his uniform as if that uniform were the last shred of the transcendence that could protect him against the cold of a future in which there will be nothing left to respect.
- For Broch, a character is conceived not as a uniqueness, inimitable and transitory, a miraculous moment fated to disappear, but as a solid bridge erected above time.
- "It takes several lives to make one person".
- Only at the end (the end of a love, of a life, of an era) does the past suddenly show itself as a whole and take on a brilliantly clear and finished shape.
- What is action? The eternal question of the novel, its constitutive question, so to speak. How is a decision born? How is it transformed into an act, and how do acts connect to make adventure? Out of the mysterious and chaotic fabric of life, the old novelists tried to tease the thread of a limpid rationality; in their view, the rationally accessible motive gives birth to an act, and that act provokes another. An adventure is a luminously casual chain of acts.
- Broch is in the context of one of the great explorations of the European novel: the exploration of the role the irrational plays in our decisions, in our lives.
- The novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry nor philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing thereby anything of its identity, which is characterized precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge.
- Only the novel can discover man's being.
- "All great works, precisely because they are great, contain something unachieved".
- In the age of the excessive division of labor, of runaway specialization, the novel is one of the las outposts where man can still maintain connections with life in its entirety.