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

There was no sleeper more elegant than she, with her curved body posed for a dance and her hand across her forehead, but there was also no one more ferocious when anyone disturbed the sensuality of her thinking she was still asleep when she no longer was.

I have learned that a man has the right and obligation to look down at another man, only when that man needs help to get up from the ground.

Love does not die, when someone gets old, people get old, because they can not love anymore.

Morality, too, is a question of time.

The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.