“our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. "co-incidence" means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time.”

“Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater the number of fortuities necessary to bring it about?”

“When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one); but in her adolescence she welcomes these coincidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings.”

“Fortunately women have the miraculous ability to change the meaning of their actions after the event.”

“Such are the Splendors and Miseries of memory: it is proud of its ability to keep truthful track of the logical sequence of past events; but when it comes to how we experienced them at the time, memory feels no obligation to truth.”

“There would seem to be nothing more obvious, more tangible and palpable than the present moment. And yet it eludes us completely. All the sadness of life lies in that fact. In the course of a single second, our senses of sight, of hearing, of smell, register (knowingly or not) a swarm of events and a parade of sensations and ideas passes through our head. Each instant represents a little universe, irrevocably forgotten in the next instant.”

“In times when history still moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted BACKDROP for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip. A historical event, though soon forgotten, sparkles the morning after with the dew of novelty. No longer a backdrop, it is now the ADVENTURE itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”