Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn't have them, it's our duty to invent them.

Sometimes it's necessary to believe in love, even if it doesn't exist.

Our needs cancel each other out, and that's as solid a base for love as any.

A story is like building a chapel; a novel is a cathedral.

Death is the twin of love and mother of us all, she struggles equally for men and women and never accepts differences of caste or class. It's death that quickens us and brings us forth on sheets of love, clasped between sleep and wakefulness and barely breathing for a spell, and thus my death shall be like everybody else's death, as majestic and as pathetic as a king or a beggar's, neither more nor less.

our love for the dead, like a floating iceberg, can only be measured by the depths of our resentments.

Every country that aspires to become a nation needs its heroes, its eminent civic and moral leaders, and if it doesn't have them, it's our duty to invent them.