“Nothing is worth the experience if it isn’t a work of imagination above all things — or the sea would be nothing but a lot of salt water … Take me, for example, for fifty years I’ve never once stopped inventing my wife. I haven’t even let her age. She must be riddled with faults I’ve turned into qualities. And in her eyes, I’m an extraordinary man. She’s never stopped inventing me, either. In fifty years of living together, you really learn not to see each other, to invent and reinvent each other with every passing day. You do always have to take things as they are, of course. But only
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