“I'd never understood whether the vogue for apologising is a sign of humility of impudence: you do something you shouldn't have done, then you apologise and wash your hands of it.”
Maia is a sober-thinking person, though some of her traits might suppose that she suffers from slight form of autism. Nevertheless, the author uses her to voice the most sincere thoughts. Many think that apologising can erase a deed, but once people start thinking before acting, fewer cruelties will occur. Maia supports her thought by an old joke about “a cowboy riding across the prairie who hears a voice from heaven telling him to go to Abilene, then at Abilene the voice tells him to go into the saloon and put all his money on number five. Tempted by the voice, he obeys, number eighteen comes up, and the voice murmur, “Too bad, we've lost.” It means that if you apologize – the loss, or damage is not so bad, but for the person who lost nothing changes”.
“Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.”
Fate of a “person of literature” is portrayed in the novel. Colonna is in his early fifties, but still has not achieved success in life as his path is concerned with “words”, and words are just words - elements that if not combined with cunning and spirit of enterprise, will never be turned into money. In the modern view, a clever person with no money is nothing but a loser. Here Socrates’s famous saying “Scio me nihil scire” becomes very valid. And Colonna, like any other loser, “dreamt about one day writing a book that would bring fame and fortune.”
“A daily newspaper is destined to become like a weekly magazine. We'll be talking about what might happen tomorrow, with feature articles, investigative supplements, unexpected predictions...”
The quote gives all the “needed” information about the format in the frames of which the newspaper “Tomorrow” will be working. The phrase might happen carries the message to the audience.
