She likes to try everything, out of curiosity, but she'll be sorry if she isn't guided by her heart.

I don't have a method. All I do is read a lot, think a lot, and rewrite constantly. It's not a scientific thing.

Morality, too, is a question of time.

The truth was that I could not manage my soul, and I was becoming aware of old age because of my weakness in the face of love.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.

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.