I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)

Ambition is a poor excuse for not having sense enough to be lazy.

When the heart speaks, the mind finds it indecent to object.

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

Between the approximation of the idea and the precision of reality there was a small gap of the unimaginable, and it was this hiatus that gave him no rest.

She was aware that in love even the most passionate idealism will not rid the body's surface of its terrible, basic importance.