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he dared to explore her withered neck w/his fingertips…her hips w/their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.
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Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
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The only thing he could do to stay alive was not to allow himself the anguish of that memory. He erased it from his mind, although from time to time in the years that were left to him he would feel it revive, with no warning and for no reason, like the sudden pang of an old scar.
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It is not that the girl is unfit for everything, it is that she is not of this world.
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I would like for my books to have been recognized posthumously, at least in capitalist countries, where they turn you into a kind of merchandise.
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Give me a prejudice and I will move the world.
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Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.
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Invulnerable to time, dedicated to the messianic happiness of thinking for us, knowing that we knew that he would not take any decision for us that did not have our measure, for he had not survived everything because of his inconceivable courage or his infinite prudence but because he was the only one among us who knew the real size of our destiny.
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The weak would never enter the kingdom of love.
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If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.
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The children would remember for the rest of their lives the august solemnity with which their father, devastated by his prolonged vigil and by the wraith of his imagination, revealed his discovery to them: 'The world is round, like an orange.
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Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.
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a process of aging had taken place in him that was so rapid and critical that soon he was being treated as one of those useless great-grandfathers who wander about the bedroom like shades, dragging their feet, remembering better times aloud, and whom no one bother about or remembers really until the morning they find them dead in their bed.
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In all the houses keys to memorizing objects and feelings had been written. But the system demanded so much vigilance and moral strength that many succumbed to the spell of an imaginary reality, one invented by themselves, which was less practical for them but more comforting.
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Over the years they both reached the same wise conclusion by different paths: it was not possible to live together in any other way, or love in any other way, and nothing in this world was more difficult than love.
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Surrealism runs through the streets.
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The world is divided into those who screw and those who do not. He distrusted those who did not—when they strayed form the straight and narrow it was something so unusual for them that they bragged about love as if they had just invented it.
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...and the cries of the birds and the uproar of the monkeys became more and more remote, and the world became eternally sad. The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders.
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You can't eat hope,' the woman said. You can't eat it, but it sustains you,' the colonel replied.
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There [is] no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.
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...they enjoyed the miracle of loving each other as much at the table as in bed, and they grew to be so happy that even when they were two worn-out old people they kept on blooming like children and playing together like dogs.
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I would give wings to children, but I would leave it to them to learn how to fly by themselves.
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I'll never fall in love again... it's like having two souls at the same time.
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I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.