“and taught him the only thing he had to learn about love: that nobody teaches life anything.”

“Nobody teaches life anything.”

“It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end it itself. ”

“The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.”

“It had to be a mad dream, one that would give her the courage she would need to discard the prejudices of a class that had not always been hers but had become hers more than anyone’s. It had to teach her to think of love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”

“Today I know I was right. The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia. My Sunday columns were there, life an archeological relic among the ruins of the past, and they realized they were not only for the old but also for the young who were not afraid of aging.”

“And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.”