“If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for. It is the same with the life of humanity. If it had a programme of the life which awaited it before entering a new stage, it would be the surest sign that it was not living, nor advancing, but simply rotating in the same place.”

“Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.”

“He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering. But that is the beginning of a new story -- the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.”

“Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in the square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.”

“He recognized that he was feeling something he had never experienced before : the desire to live in one place forever. With the girl with the raven hair his days would never be the same again”

“Oh God, how did he get to be sixty? How quickly the years had passed! His whole life had passed before he realized it, before he began. He hadn’t lived. What had he done in his life? What had he achieved? Could he measure his happy times? How much? How many? Several days, a few months at best? It was not fair to advance in years without realizing the value of time, not fair that no one drew our attention to the time that was slipping through our fingers by the moment. It was a clever trick: to realize the value of life only just before it ended.”