There are things that can be accomplished only by violence. Physical love is unthinkable without violence.

Which doesn't mean, of course, that I'd stopped loving her, that I'd forgotten her, or that her image had paled; on the contrary; in the form of a quiet nostalgia she remained constantly within me; I longed for her as one longs for something definitively lost.

Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

Forgive me," he went on. "For a long time I have had the peculiar habit of not arriving but appearing.

Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary.

The rediscovered path, where were left the traces of childhood's lost steps.

How did the senator know that children meant happiness? Could he see into their souls? What if the moment they were out of sight, three of them jumped the fourth and began beating him up?