How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it’s another man’s flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it’s...

No era inquietud propiamente dicha, sino una extraña tristeza que tenía poco de humano, porque no comportaba ni valentía ni esperanza. Así es como los animales esperan la muerte. Así es como el pez atrapado...

Her grandfather’s books […] opened before Ada, a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away. Boris Godunov, Satan, Athalia, King Lear: they all spoke words charged with meaning;...

But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others…Yet this music, the sound...

The breath of wind that moved them was still chilly on this day in May; the flowers gently resisted, curling up with a kind of trembling grace and turning their pale stamens towards the ground....

…she cried because prejudice outlives passion and because she was sentimentally patriotic.

What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.

Believe me, my boy, women don’t love a man for himself but as a weapon against other women.

Waiting is erotic

For there comes a time in life when the pity previously reserved only for children takes on a different form, a time when we study the faces of ‘old people’ and sense that one day...

Deep within everyone’s heart there always remains a sense of longing for that hour, that summer, that one brief moment of blossoming. For several weeks or months, rarely longer, a beautiful young woman lives outside...

En el fondo, seguía siendo, y siempre sería, una niña tímida que sólo se sentía a gusto en una soledad montaraz.

Heureux sont ceux qui peuvent aimer et haïr sans feinte, sans détour, sans nuance.

The way a man drinks in company tells you nothing about him, but the way he drinks when alone reveals, without his realizing it, the very depths of his soul.

…because all happiness is contagious, and disarms the spirit of hatred.