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.

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.

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.

Everything that goes into my mouth seems to make me fat, everything that comes out of my mouth embarrasses me.

Music is important for one's health.

One can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the sorrow with each, and not betray any of them.

What Uncle Leo XIII never suspected was that his nephew's courage did not come from the need to survive or from a brute indifference inherited from his father, but from a driving need for love, which no obstacle in this world or the next would ever break.