He soon acquired the forlorn look that one sees in vegetarians.

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.

My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.

but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.

Florentina Ariza had kept his answer ready for fifty-three years, seven months and eleven days and nights. 'Forever,' he said.

But that afternoon he asked himself, with his infinite capacity for illusion, if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.