And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.

She always had a headache, or it was too hot, always, or she pretended to be asleep, or she had her period again, her period, always her period. So much so that Dr. Urbino had dared to say in class, only for the relief of unburdening himself without confession, that after ten years of marriage women had their periods as often as threes times a week.

To oppression, plundering and abandonment, we respond with life.

She discovered with great delight that one does not love one's children just because they are one's children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Thinking that it would console him, she took a piece of charcoal and erased the innumerable loves that he still owed her for, and she voluntarily brought up her own most solitary sadnesses so as not to leave him alone in his weeping.