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It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbour was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

now that she was passionately involved, she found little to regret. To feel so much was its own justification.

People don't save other people. People save themselves.

Though at this moment she felt abused, abandoned, and ashamed of herself, Madeleine knew that she was still young, that she had her whole life ahead of her —a life in which, if she persevered, she might do something special— and that of persevering meant getting past moments just like this one, when people made you feel small, unloveable, and took away your confidence.

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable

She disapproved of the idea of meaningless

But then, gifts are like beauty, are they not. It is in the eye of the recipient that they find their seat, not in the hand of the giver

she used the word anyway like an eraser on a crowded chalkboard. She said it whenever she needed to clear off the things she'd just shared to make room for more

El potencial del cerebro humano es, a efectos prácticos, ilimitado.

The magnolia trees hadn't read Roland Barthes. They didn't think love was a mental state; the magnolias insisted it was natural, perennial.

En la inteligencia lo que importa no es con qué potencial nacemos, sino qué hacemos con él. En este sentido podemos decir que la inteligencia es adquirida, no innata.

La verdadera prueba de inteligencia radica no en cuántas cosas sabemos hacer, sino en cómo actuamos cuando no sabemos hacerlas.

Todos somos tan inteligentes como para poder resolver todos los problemas que nos planteemos. Sólo precisamos tener motivación, estímulo y crearnos la necesidad de lograrlo. La destreza para poder solucionar cualquier problema se adquiere al intentar dar con la solución.

The lover's discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn't physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.

Being fortunate had dulled her powers of observation.

Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude. It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn't tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.

Madeleine requiered emotion, apparently. She disapproved of the idea of meaningless, extremely satisfying sex.

I have some instinct for survival, for self-preservation. And believing you have such an instinct is almost as good as actually having it, because it means you act in the same way.

I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory.

When you're young —when I was young— you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we had told abour our life. Told to others, but —mainly— to ourselves.

But time... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time... give us time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

Odd how the image of someone's posture always remains with you.

It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be remainded of instability beneath our feet.

We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, (...) the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

Cuando una persona e incluso un animal se da cuenta de que no puede controlar lo que le ocurre, ni controlar cómo le ocurre, se vuelve pasivo o tiende a huir de aquella situación

Though why should we expect life to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpouse could nostalgia serve?

The more you learn, the less you fear. "Learn" not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives— (...) and if we're talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it's possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure.