“He was rather clumsy and shy and looked as if he'd spent the last ten years of his life locked up in a library - hardly the kind of man any girl your age dreams of ...”

“Now he knew that any memories he might cherish during the last years of his life would be only fictions from a biography he'd never lived.”

“Don't add on any years, you rascal. Life will see to that without your help.”

“Making money isn't hard in itself. What's hard is to earn it doing something worth devoting your life to.”

“A man must have vices, expensive ones if possible. Otherwise when he reaches old age he will have nothing to be redeemed from.”

“A good father. A man with a head, a heart, and a soul. A man capable of listening, of leading and respecting a child, and not of drowning his own defects in him. Someone whom a child will not only love because he's his father, but will also admire for the person he is. Someone he would want to grow up to resemble.”

“I found my father asleep in his dining-room armchair, with a blanket over his legs and his favorite book open in his hands--a copy of Voltaire's Candide, which he reread a couple of times a year, the only times I heard him laugh heartily. I observed him: his hair was gray, thinning, and the skin on his face had begun to sag around his cheekbones. I looked at that man whom I had once imagined almost invincible; he now seemed fragile, defeated without knowing it. Perhaps we were both defeated. I leaned over to cover him with the blanket he had been promising to give away to charity for years, and I kissed his forehead, as if by doing so I could protect him from the invisible threads that kept him away from me, from that tiny apartment, and from my memories, as if I believed that with that kiss I could deceive time and convince it to pass us by, to return some other day, some other life.”