It was then that she realized that the yellow butterflies preceded the appearances of Mauricio Babilonia.

He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.

There had never been a death so foretold.

Then the writing became so fluid that I sometimes felt as if I were writing for the sheer pleasure of telling a story, which may be the human condition that most resembles levitation.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

A man knows when he is growing old because he begins to look like his father.

The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.