“Absolute beauty,That which contains all the world's majesty and miseryAnd which is only visible to those who love.”

“Brief like beauty,Absolute beauty,That which contains all the world's majesty and miseryAnd which is only visible to those who love.”

“With the innocence of the dead, who no longer mind being observed, the people in the photographs gazed out on the professors' barely contained enthusiasm.”

“I went on happily reading well into the night, when no one ventured on to the decks of the Donizetti, except for sinful shadows who were careful not to interrupt me, careful not to disturb my reading, happiness, happiness, passion regained, genuine devotion, my prayers rising up and up through the clouds to the realm of pure music, to what for want of a better name we call the choir of the angels, a non-human space but undoubtedly the only imaginable space we humans can truly inhabit, an uninhabitable space but the only one worth inhabiting, a space in which we shall cease to be but the only space in which we can be what we truly are...”

“I think of all those who believed in a Latin American paradise and died in a Latin American hell.”

“The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.”

“Which is to say, boys, that I saw our struggles and dreams all tangled up in the same failure, and that failure was called joy.”