Yes, she is in love with him, and yes, in spite of his qualms and inner hesitations, he loves her back, however improbable that might seem to him. Note here for the record that he is not someone with a special fixation on young girls. Until now, all the women in his life have been more or less his own age. Pilar therefore does not represent an embodiment of some ideal female type for him--she is merely herself, a small piece of luck he stumbled across one afternoon in a public park, an exception to every rule.

We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another – for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself.

I feel now, in my impending old age, very lucky. I just can't tell you how lucky I feel, that I've managed to first of all, stay alive this long, in reasonably good health, and that I've been able to do what I want to do.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

Something happens, Blue thinks, and then it goes on happening forever. It can never be changed, can never be otherwise.

I wanted to do something different. Therefore, the first person I thought would have been too exclusionary. It would have said me, me, me, me, me. I, I, I, I, I. As if I were pushing away my experiences from the experiences of others. Because basically what I was trying to do was show our commonality. I mean to say, in the very ordinariness of what I recount I think perhaps the reader will find resonances with his or her own life.

To leave the world a little better than you found it. That's the best a man can ever do.