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“Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.”
Neither could have said if their mutual dependence was based on love or convenience, but they had never asked the question with their hands on their hearts because both had always preferred not to know the answer.
But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.
He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.
human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.
“No, not rich,” he said. “I am a poor man with money, which is not the same thing.”
Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.
the shadow of someone whom no one had ever known.
one does not love one’s children just because they are one’s children but because of the friendship formed while raising them.
“The problem with marriage is that it ends every night after making love, and it must be rebuilt every morning before breakfast.”
“The problem in public life is learning to overcome terror; the problem in married life is learning to overcome boredom.”
She had confused cholera with love, of course, long before her memory failed.
it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
“My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.”
“It is incredible how one can be happy for so many years in the midst of so many squabbles, so many problems, damn it, and not really know if it was love or not.”
