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.

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

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

In the beginning, when the world was new and nothing had a name, my father took me to see the ice.

and the two of them loved each other for a long time in silence without making love again.

She sensed it, saw my eyes wet with tears, and only then must have discovered I was no longer the man I had been, and I endured her glance with a courage I never thought I had.

She knew that it would not be easy to submit to his miserliness, or the foolishness of his premature appearance of age, or his maniacal sense of order, or his eagerness to as for everything and give nothing at all in return, but despite all this, no man was better company because no other man in the world was so in need of love.