The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.

She was a ghost in a strange house that overnight had become immense and solitary and through which she wandered without purpose, asking herself in anguish which one of them was deader: the man who had died or the woman he had left behind.

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.

The war is in the mountains,” he said. “For as long as I can remember, they have killed us in the cities with decrees, not with bullets.

Fiction was invented the day Jonas arrived home and told his wife that he was three days late because he had been swallowed by a whale.

A man should have two wives: one to love and one to sew on his buttons.

And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.