“he decided to start living the life he imagined. He believe he could so he did...And replaced the fear of unknown with curiosity...He looked around and life was pretty amazing...”

“...enjoying herself... enjoying the rain that she breathes... the same that breathes her.”

“Again his dead wife came back to his imagination, but not as he had known her for many years, not as the good domestic housewife, but as a young girl with a slim figure, innocently inquiring eyes, and a tight twist of hair on her childish neck. He remembered how he had seen her for the first time. He was still a student then. He had met her on the staircase of his lodgings, and, jostling by accident against her, he tried to apologise, and could only mutter, 'Pardon, monsieur,' while she bowed, smiled, and suddenly seemed frightened, and ran away, though at the bend of the staircase she had glanced rapidly at him, assumed a serious air, and blushed. Afterwards, the first timid visits, the half-words, the half-smiles, and embarrassment; and melancholy, and yearnings, and at last that breathing rapture.... Where had it all vanished? She had been his wife, he had been happy as few on earth are happy.... 'But,' he mused, 'these sweet first moments, why could one not live an eternal, undying life in them?”

“Explain to me, I beg you. Must man have a goal on this earth, or, on the contrary, must he be concerned with nothing at all? And if so, how can he live? He needs a plan, isn't that right?”

“My son,' he wrote to me, 'fear the love of woman; fear that bliss, that poison....”

“I remember sitting in his office a hundred times during those grim months and each time thinking, What on earth can he say that will make me feel better or keep me alive? Well, there never was anything he could say, that's the funny thing. It was all the stupid, desperately optimistic, condescending things he didn't say that kept me alive; all the compassion and wamrth I felt from him that could not have been said; all the intelligence, competence, and time he put into it; and his granite belief that mine was a life worth living.”

“Man is afraid to attain what he longs for, just as subconsciously he longs for what he is afraid of.”