“Among other things a marriage is a system of belief, a story, and though it manifests itself in things that are real enough, the impulse that drives it is ultimately mysterious.”

“I can see us there still," he said, "for those were moments so intense that in a way we will be living them always, while other things are completely forgotten. Yet there is no particular story att...”

“The world is constantly evolving, while the family endeavours to stay the same. Updated, refurbished, modernised, but essentially the same. A house in the landscape, both shelter and prison.”

“I didn't appear to need anyone: I could do it all myself. I could do everything. I was both halves: did that mean I was whole?”

“As it happened I was no longer interested in literature as a form of snobbery or even of self-definition I had no desire to prove that one book was better than another; in fact, if I read somethin...”

“So much is lost, he said, in the shipwreck. What remains are fragments, and if you don't hold on to them the sea will take them too.”

“Es dificilsimo que hasta los ms bondadosos, los que ms te quieren, se tomen tus intereses verdaderamente en serio, porque suelen aconsejarte desde una vida ms segura y ms aislada que la tuya, en la...”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”

“If I had a flower for every time I thought of you...I could walk through my garden forever.”

“When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too.”

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

“This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.”