The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.

He governed as if he felt predestined to never die

There is no greater glory than to die for love.

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.

In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.

I don't believe in God, but I'm afraid of Him.