They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

There was a house at the foot of the tower, close to the thunder of the waves breaking against the cliffs, where love was more intense because it seemed like a shipwreck.

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.

"Things have a life of their own," the gypsy proclaimed with a harsh accent. "It's simply a matter of waking up their souls."

What is essential, therefore, is not that you no longer believe, but that God continues to believe in you.

All my life, I've been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.

One had to live a long time to know a man's true nature.