“I’ve remained a virgin for you.”

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”

“One never quite stops believing, some doubt remains forever".”

“[A]nd both of them remained floating in an empty universe where the only everyday and eternal reality was love.”

“At that instant the smoking mouths of the rifles were aimed at him and letter by letter he heard the encyclicals that Mequiades had chanted and he heart the lost steps of Santa Sofia de la Piedad, a virgin, in the classroom, and in his nose he felt the same icy hardness that had drawn his attention in the nostrils of the corpse of Remedios.”

“It was the last that remained of a past whose annihilation had not taken place because it was still in a process of annihilation, consuming itself from within, ending at every moment but never ending its ending.”

“Amaranta would sigh, laugh, and dream of a second homeland of handsome men and beautiful women who spoke a childlike language, with ancient cities of whose past grandeur only the cats among the rubble remained.”