“Love is a battle" she said smiling, "And I plan on going fighting 'til the end." "Love is a battle? well, I don’t feel at all like fighting," and he left.”

“Love is a battle," said Marie-Claude, still smiling. "And I plan to go on fighting. To the end."Love is a battle?" said Franz. "Well, I don't feel at all like fighting." And he left.”

“What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?”

“Love is a continual interrogation. I don’t know of a better definition of love.”

“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.”

“All of man's life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others.”

“Through the air floated only important words, and Flajsman said to himself that love has but one true measure, and that is death. At the end of true love is death, and only the love that ends in death is love.”