“But which was the real me? Let me be perfectly honest: I was a man of many faces. (p.33)”

“I was not a hypocrite, with one real face and several false ones. I had several faces because I was young and didn't know who I was or wanted to be.”

“It seemed to me an error in reasoning for a man to isolate a woman he loves from all the circumstances in which he met her and in which she lives, to try, with dogged inner concentration, to purify her of everything that is not her self, which is to say also of the story that they lived through together and that gives their ove its shape.After all, what I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns toward me, what she is for me. I love her as a character in our common love story.”

“Only the basic situations in life occur only once, never to return. For a man to be a man, he must be fully aware of this never-to-return. (p.148)”

“I understood that there was no escaping the memories, that I was surround by them. (p.30)”

“Lucie had been many things to me: a child, a source of comfort, a balm, an escape from myself; she was literaly everything for me but a woman.”

“Only after a while did it occur to me (in spite of the chilly silence which surrounded me) that my story was not of the tragic sort, but rather of the comic variety.At any rate that afforded me some comfort.”