Are you not tempted to create a story for which men and women would live and die, for which they would be capable of killing and allowing them to be killed, of sacrificing and condemning themselves, of handling over their souls?

I stepped into the bookshop and breathed in that perfume of paper and magic that strangely no one had ever thought of bottling.

The nurse knew that those who really love, love in silence, with deeds and not with words.

It's curious how easy it is to tell a piece of paper what you don't dare say to someone's face.

Wine turns the wise man into a fool and the fool into a wise man.

Our world will not die as the result of the bomb, as the papers say, it will die of laughter, of banality, or making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.

I wondered what on earth she saw in me that could make her want to befriend me, other than a pale reflection of herself, an echo of solitude and loss. In my ..reveries, we were always two fugitives riding on the spine of a book, eager to escape into worlds of fiction and second hand dreams