For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

In the plenitude of their relationship, Florentina Ariza asked himself which of the two was love: the turbulent bed or the peaceful Sunday afternoons, and Sara Noriega calmed him with the simple argument that love was everything they did naked. She said, 'Spiritual love from the waist up and physical love from the waist down.

Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.

Sex is one's consolation when love is not enough

Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.