“It was as if, after years of setting aside memories,the pile had grown too high, and had tumbled, obliging her to take an inventory of her life.”

“I take you and pile high the memories. Death will break her claws on some I keep.”

“The years of her life tumbled out onto the floor like marbles that she would never be able to gather up again in one bowl. The years of her life had been a made puzzle that one day gets unmade, the pieces all scattered.”

“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”

“Of course,there had only been one place to find her.The first one.The beginning.Daniel tumbled toward the first life, ready to wait there for as long as it would take Luce to make her way there,too. He would take her in his arms, whisper in her ear, At last. I found you.I will never let you do.”

“Always. At every moment, asleep and awake, during the most sublime and most abject moments, Amaranta thought of Rebeca, because solitude had made a selection in her memory and had burned the dimming piles of nostalgic waste that life had accumulated in her heart, and had purified, magnified, and eternalized the others, the most bitter ones.”