He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most.

the bells of glory that announced to the world the good news that the uncountable time of eternity had come to an end

Why do you insist on talking about what does not exist?

wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

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.