“Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this is how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined.”

“Life versus Death becomes, as Montaigne pointed out, Old Age versus Death. ”

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

“When you are young, you think that the old lament the deterioration of life because this makes it easier for them to die without regret. When you are old, you become impatient with the way in which the young applaud the most insignificant improvements … while remaining heedless of the world’s barbarism. I don’t say things have got worse; I merely say the young wouldn’t notice if they had. The old times were good because then we were young, and ignorant of how ignorant the young can be.”

“Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? There had been addition and subtraction in my life, but how much multiplication?”

“Novels tell us the most truth about life: what it is, how we live it, what it might be for, how we enjoy and value it, and how we lose it.”

“I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded—and how pitiful that was.”