“Jose Palacios, his oldest servant, found him floating naked with his eyes open in the purifying waters of his bath and thought he had drowned.”

“She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.”

“Carmelia Montiel, a twenty-year-old virgin, had just bathed in orange-blossom water and was strewing rosemary leaves on Pilar Ternera's bed when the shot rang out. Aureliano José had been destined to find with her the happiness that Amaranta had denied him, to have seven children, and to die in her arms of old age, but the bullet that entered his back and shattered his chest had been directed by a wrong interpretation of the cards.”

“Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs, floating in the dazzling backwater they had found on the other side of fear.”

“This was his world, he said to himself, the sad, oppressive world that God had provided for him, and he was responsible to it.”

“In his paradise in Lima he had spent a joyous night with a young girl who was covered with fine, straight down over every millimeter of her Bedouin skin. At dawn, while he was shaving, he looked at her lying naked in the bed, adrift in the peaceful sleep of a satisfied woman, and he could not resist the temptation of possessing her forever with a sacramental act. He covered her from head to foot with shaving lather, and with a pleasure like that of love he shaved her clean with his razor, sometimes using his right hand and sometimes his left as he shaved every part of her body, even the eyebrows that grew together, and left her doubly naked inside her magnificent newborn's body. She asked, her soul in shreds, if he really loved her, and he answered with the same ritual phrase he had strewn without pity in so many hearts throughout his life: "More than anyone else in this world.”

“but he only found her in the image that saturated his private and terrible solitude.”