Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.

I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.

Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.

What does he say?' he asked. 'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.' 'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.

and realized that death was not only a permanent probability, as he had always believed, but an immediate reality.

Life is but a continual succession of opportunities for surviving.

opened the door a crack wide enough for the entire world to pass through .