Amputees suffer pains, cramps, itches in the leg that is no longer there. That is how she felt without him, feeling his presence where he no longer was.

He could not understand why he had needed so many words to explain what he felt in war because one was enough: fear. ~Jose Aracadio Segundo Buendia After the second banana slaughter

a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.

While a person does not give up on sex, sex does not give up on the person.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Life had already given him sufficient reasons for knowing that no defeat was the final one.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.