The interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.

In her final years she would still recall the trip that, with the perverse lucidity of nostalgia, became more and more recent in her memory.

Life is not what one lived, but what One remembers and how One remembers it in order to recount it

She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.