The Japanese Lover

by Isabel Allende

in itself age doesn’t make anyone better or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been.

She accused him of having grandiose ideas and sloppy habits, a fatal combination for a writer.

The marriage broker offered him three candidates and he selected the first, because he liked her name, Heideko.

He guessed her secret must be her ability to listen to the same story a thousand times over as if she were hearing it for the first time, all those tales the old folks keep repeating to accommodate the past and create an acceptable self-portrait, erasing remorse and extolling their real or imagined virtues. Nobody wants to end their life with a banal past.

He did not want to mold her as he did his own children, simply to protect her, and that allowed him the freedom to love her.

Alma detested old people’s obsession with their ailments, their aches and pains, a subject of no possible interest to others, not even doctors.

We all have demons in the dark recesses of our soul, but if we bring them out into the light, they grow smaller and weaker, they fall silent and eventually leave us in peace.”

humanity in general, whom she considered in the main stupid, cruel when it had the opportunity, and sentimental at best.

it was only a vague empathy for others that prevented her from being a psychopath.

“Good night, Death,” she would say before she went to sleep, in the vague hope that she wouldn’t wake up;

They willingly accepted that each of them had their own secret world and private times, which they were under no obligation to account for. Omissions were not lies.

You explained to me that inspiration is born of stillness, and creativity comes from movement.