If you're going to be a writer you have to be one of the great ones... After all, there are better ways to starve to death.

The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.

Seeing him like this, dressed just for her in so patent a manner, she could not hold back the fiery blush that rose to her face. She was embarrassed when she greeted him, and he was more embarrassed by her embarrassment. The knowledge that they were behaving as if they were sweethearts was even more embarrassing, and the knowledge that they were both embarrassed embarrassed them so much that Captain Samaritano noticed it with a tremor of compassion.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself.

He shook my hand and said goodbye with a sentence that might have been either good advice or a threat: "Take good care of yourself.

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