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He had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral if it helps to perpetuate love.
his conviction that 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.”
In the restorative idleness of solitude, on the other hand, the widows discovered that the honorable way to live was at the body’s bidding, eating only when one was hungry, loving without lies, sleeping without having to feign sleep in order to escape the indecency of official love, possessed at last of the right to an entire bed to themselves, where no one fought them for half of the sheet, half of the air they breathed, half of their night, until their bodies were satisfied with dreaming their own dreams, and they woke alone.
palace she learned to know him, they learned to know each other, and she discovered with great delight that 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.”
as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age, with the even greater disadvantage of being a man and weaker than she was.
“Of course,” she said. “After all, letters belong to the person who writes them. Don’t you agree?” He made a bold move. “I do,” he said. “That is why they are the first things returned when an affair is ended.”
“They can all go to hell,” she said. “If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders.”
“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.”
For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.
