Banality is sometimes striking.

Stormy skies, says Ernesto. He grieved for them. Summer rain. Childhood.

It was the men I deceived the most that I loved the most.

You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.

The words emerge from her body without her realizing it, as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.

A woman's work, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed, is as hard as a day at war, worse than a man's working day. ... To men, women's work was like the rain-bringing clouds, or the rain itself. The task involved was carried out every day as regularly as sleep. So men were happy - men in the Middle Ages, men at the time of the Revolution, and men in 1986: everything in the garden was lovely.

Some people are like that - closed - they can't learn from anyone. Us, for example, we can't learn anything, neither I from you nor you from me, nor from anyone, nor from anything, nor from what happens.