Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.

Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap.

She would walk through the kitchen at any hour, whenever she was hungry, and put her fork in the pots and eat a little of everything without placing anything on a plate, standing in front of the stove, talking to the serving women, who were the only ones with whom she felt comfortable, the ones she got along with best.

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.

It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.

wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

He was still too young to know that the heart's memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.