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

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

I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance.

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.

They looked like two children," she told me. And that thought frightened her, because she'd always felt that only children are capable of everything.

...and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.