“When the past is recaptured by the imagination, breath is put back into life.”

“Among all the other nights upon nights, the girl had spent that one on the boat….when it happened, the burst of Chopin…. There wasn’t a breath of wind and the music spread all over the dark boat, like a heavenly injunction whose import was unknown, like an order from God whose meaning was inscrutable. And the girl started up as if to go and kill herself in her turn, throw herself in her turn into the sea, and afterwards, she wept because she thought of the man from Cholon and suddenly she wasn’t sure she hadn’t loved him with a love she hadn’t seen because it had lost itself in the affair like water in the sand and she rediscovered it only now, through this moment of music.”

“Very early in my life it was too late.”

“Life is only lived full-time by women with children.”

“You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.”

“When you wept it was just over yourself and not because of the marvelous impossibility of reaching her through the difference that separates you.”

“When it's in a book I don't think it'll hurt any more ...exist any more. One of the things writing does is wipe things out. Replace them.”