It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

She wanted to be herself again, to recover all that she had been obliged to give up in half a century of servitude that had doubtless made her happy but which, once her husband was dead, did not leave her even the vestiges of her identity.

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

She would say, "Someone should invent something to do with things you cannot use anymore but that you still cannot throw out.

There is no greater glory than to die for love.

I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.

When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.