his examination revealed that he had no fever, no pain anywhere, and that his only concrete feeling was an urgent desire to die. All that was needed was shrewd questioning...to conclude once again that the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera.

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.

This was when she asked him whether it was true that love conquered all, as the songs said. 'It is true', he replied, 'but you would do well not to believe it.

She would not shed a tear, she would not waste the rest of her years simmering in the maggot broth of memory.

They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.

It's much more important to write than to be written about.

Old people, with other old people, are not so old.