Death really did not matter to him but life did, and therefore the sensation he felt when they gave their decision was not a feeling of fear but of nostalgia.

He was healthier than the rest of us, but when you listened with the stethoscope you could hear the tears bubbling inside his heart.

He always considered death an unavoidable professional hazard.

More than mother and son, they were accomplices in solitude.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

I must warn you that the books I like are not necessarily the ones I think are the best. I like them for various reasons not always easy to explain.

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.