Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

All at once I felt so vain, like a girl posturing for the crowds as she walks along, only to discover the street is empty.

I don't like things held up before me that I cannot have.

Grief is a most peculiar thing; we’re so helpless in the face of it. It’s like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

At that moment, beauty itself struck me as a kind of painful melancholy.

We lead our lives like water flowing down a hill, going more or less in one direction until we splash into something that forces us to find a new course.

Here's the thing: this eel spends its entire life trying to find a home, and what do you think women have inside them? Caves, where the eels like to live...when they find a cave they like, the wriggle around inside it for a while to be sure that...well, to be sure it's a nice cave, I suppose. And when they've made up their minds that it's comfortable, they mark the cave as their territory...by spitting.