It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.

Taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.

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

The first of the line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants .

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

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.

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.