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.

Jealousy knows more than truth does.

His place was always set at the table, in case he rturned from the dead without warning .

This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

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.

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.