But he could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most... he saw fireflies where there were none.

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.

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.

Four geological eras had to pass so that human beings would be able to outsing the birds and die for love.

One minute of reconciliation is worth more than a whole life of friendship!

More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.