He who awaits much can expect little.

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.

Her nakedness was not absolute, for like Manet's _Olympia__, behind her ear she had a poisonous flower with orange petals, and she also wore a gold bangle on her right wrist and a necklace of tiny pearls. I imagined I would never see anything more exciting for as long as I lived, and today I can confirm that I was right.

The only thing worse than bad health is a bad name.

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.