“What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.”

“And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?”

“Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard ...”

“You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.”

“There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is ...”

“Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?”

“whoever approaches his goal dances”

“To be depressed or neurotic is passive. It has happened to all of us; we are its victims, are we have no control over it.”

“Florentino Ariza always forgot when he should not have that women, and Prudencia Pitre more than any other, always think about the hidden meanings of questions more than about the questions themsel...”

“Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”

“Vanity is becoming a nuisance, I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I'm not ready for that yet.”

“Virtue would go far if vanity did not keep it company.Francois de La Rochefoucauld”

“Flattery is a kind of bad money, to which our vanity gives us currency.”