“He understood then that all his exploits as a reporter, the feats that had won him such recognition and fame, were merely an attempt to keep his most ancient fears at bay, a stratagem for taking refuge behind a lens to test whether reality was more tolerable from that perspective.”

“He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission.”

“I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn't an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by my senses....If that were true, each of us was living in absolute isolation. The thought terrified me. I was consoled by the idea that I could take that gelatin and mold it to create anything I wanted...At times I felt that the universe fabricated from the power of the imagination had stronger and more lasting contours than the blurred realm of the flesh-and-blood creatures around me.”

“She asked herself a thousand times why she had hungered so desperately to belong body and soul to Joaquin Andieta when truth she had never been totally happy in his arms, and could explain it only in terms of first love. She had been ready to fall in love when he came to the house to unload some cargo; the rest was instinct. She had merely obeyed the most powerful and ancient of calls, but it had happened an eternity ago and seven thousand miles away. Who she was then and what she had seen in him she could not say, only that now her heart was far away from there. Not only was she tired of looking for him but deep down she did not want to find him; at the same time, though, she could not go on riddled with doubt. She needed an ending for that phase in order to begin a new love with a clean slate”

“As soon as the period of mourning for Dona Ester was over and the big house on the corner was finished, Esteban Trueba and Clara del Valle were married in a modest ceremony. Esteban gave his wife a set of diamond jewelry, which she thought beautiful. She packed it away in a shoe box and quickly forgot where she had put it. They spent their honeymoon in Italy and two days after they were on the boat. Esteban was as madly in love as an adolescent, despite the fact that the movement of the ship made Clara uncontrollably ill and the tight quarters gave her asthma. Seated by her side in the narrow cabin, pressing cold compress to her forehead and holding her while she vomited, he felt profoundly happy and desired her with unjust intensity considering the wretched state to which she was reduced. On the fourth day at sea, she woke up feeling better and they went out on deck to look at the sea. Seeing her with her wind-reddened nose, and laughing at the slightest provocation, Esteban swore that sooner or later she would come to love him as he needed to be loved, even if it meant he had to resort to extreme measures. He realized that Clara did not belong to him and that if she continued living in her world of apparitions, three-legged chairs that moved of their own volition, and cards that spelled out the future, she probably never would. Clara's impudent and nonchalant sensuality was also not enough for him. He wanted far more than her body; he wanted control over that undefined and luminous material that lay within her and that escaped him even in those moments when she appeared to be dying of pleasure. His hands felt very heavy, his feet very big, his voice very hard, his beard very scratchy, and his habits of rape and whoring very deeply ingrained, but even if he had to turn himself inside out like a glove, he was prepared to do everything in his power to seduce her.”

“The fear is not real, Dil Bahadur; it is only in your mind, like all other things. Our thoughts form what we believe to be reality.”

“Absolute silence greeted the mystery of death, and for a time impossible to measure they waited, motionless, while Lynn's spirit rose from her body. Severo felt a long howl surging from the center of the earth and passing through his body to his lips, but it did not escape. The scream invaded him, filled him, and burst inside his head in a silent explosion.Portrait in Sepia, Isabel Allende.”