I could tell you it's the heart, but what is really killing him is loneliness. Memories are worse than bullets.

...until that moment I had not understood that this was a story about lonely people, about absence and loss, and that that was why I had taken refuge in it until it became confused with my own life, like someone who has escaped into the pages of a novel because those whom he needs to love seem nothing more than ghosts inhabiting the mind of a stranger.

The most efficient way of rendering the poor harmless is to teach them to want to imitate the rich.

Fools talk, cowards are silent, wise men listen.

She was seventeen, her entire life shining on her lips.

The only use for military service is that it reveals the number of morons in the population," he would remark. "And that can be discovered in the first two weeks; there's no need for two years. Army, Marriage, the Church and Banking: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Yes, go on, laugh.

One can convert only a sinner, never a saint.