“Hate and love are reciprocal passions.”

“Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness, and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was time when they both loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other moral trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.”

“For at the height of pleasure he had experienced a revelation that he could not believe, that he even refused to admit, which was that his illusory love for Fermina Daza could be replaced by an earthly passion.”

“It was as if they had leapt over the arduous cavalry of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love. They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love. For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.”

“He thought about his people without sentimentalily, with a strick closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated the most.”

“My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show.”

“and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.”