The Literary Life

“With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it: that one can be in love with several people at the same time, feel the same sorrow with each, and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier, he said to himself in a flash of anger: “My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.””

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

“If she were a writer she would collect her pencils and notebooks and favourite cat and write in bed. Strangers and lovers would never get past the locked door.”

A novel worth reading is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility, of what human nature is, of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

“She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris.”

“European nights might be pitch-dark or coal-black, but not American nights, which are dark like a void, where there’s nothing to hold on to, no shelter from the elements, just empty, storm-whipped space, above and below.”

“History suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.”

“The only obsession everyone wants: ‘love.’ People think that in falling in love they make themselves whole? The Platonic union of souls? I think otherwise. I think you’re whole before you begin. And the love fractures you. You’re whole, and then you’re cracked open.”

“He was almost intrigued by the idea of giving in to his oddness, turning into one of those remote, ineffectual creatures, so warped by their solitude that they became distasteful to normal people.”

“I don’t have much time, I have to haul corpses. I don’t have much time, I have to breath, eat, drink, sleep. I don’t have much time, I have to keep the gears meshing. I don’t have much time, I’m busy living. I don’t have much time, I’m busy dying.”