But now I knew that true love was above all that and that it would be better to die than to fail to love. I had thought that only others had the courage to love. But now I discovered that I too was capable of loving. Even if loving meant leaving, or solitude, or sorrow, love was worth every penny of its price. (from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept)
I love scandals about other people, but scandals about myself do not interest me. The have not got the charm of novelty.
There are two ways of looking at someone's face. One is looking at their eyes as a part of it. The other is looking at the eyes only, as if they were the face. It's one of those things that intimidate when you do them. Because the eyes are a miniature of life. White around, like the nothingness in which life drifts, the coloured iris, like the unpredictable variety that portrays it, until diving into the black of the pupil that swallows everything, like a dark well without colour and without bottom. And that's where I plunged looking at Silvia that way, in the deep ocean of her life, entering inside and letting her enter mine: the eyes but I couldn't stand the look. Silvia could.
How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book..
I suppose that when he points the barrel of the gun to his forehead, the suicide victim may feel for a moment what may be about to happen is what I felt in that moment: a feeling of curiosity.
He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
It wasn't the honey locust curving towards the honeysuckle, but the honeysuckle embracing the honey locust. No reciprocal concession: the one never gave up, and the others always curved.
We must never judge other people's lives, because every person knows only their pain and renounce. It is one thing to feel you're on the right path, another to think it is your only one.
If a doctor had been present, perhaps he would have been able to stop the haemorrhaging that took Penelope's life, while she shrieked and scratched at the locked door, on the other side of which her father wept in silence and her mother cowered, staring at her husband. (...) When at last they opened the door and found Penelope lying dead in a pool of her own blood, hugging a shining, purple-coloured baby, nobody was capable of uttering a single word.
The other day they asked me to leave on of their places of worship as I was wearing a sleeveless dress - she explained sadly.
Apparently the Almighty doesn't like my arms even if he created them.