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

“If God hadn't rested on Sunday, He would have had time to finish the world.”

“In a solemn way, as if he had just thought of it, he said: The world is moving ahead. Yes, I said, it's moving ahead, but it's revolving around the sun.”

“She asked him to come and see her that night. He agreed, in order to get away, knowing that he was incapable of going. But that night, in his burning bed, he understood that he had to go see her, even if he were not capable. He got dressed by feel, listening in the dark to his brother's calm breathing, the dry cough of his father in the next room, the asthma of the hens in the courtyard, the buzz of the mosquitoes, the beating of his heart, and the inordinate bustle of a world that he had not noticed until then, and he went out in the sleeping street.”

“What does he say?' he asked.'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.''Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

“The world must be all fucked up," he said then, "when men travel first class and literature goes as freight.”

“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.”