“Amalfitano remembered a time when he believed that nothing happened by chance, everything happened for some reason, but when was that time? he couldn't remember, all he could remember was that at some point thiw was what he believed...”

“While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one answer that occurred to him was old age. One day, walking down some street in Brooklyn, Antonio Jones had felt tired, sat down on the sidewalk, and a second later stopped existing.”

“According to Padilla, remembered Amalfitano, all literature could be classified as heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Novels, in general, were heterosexual. Poetry, on the other hand, was completely homosexual. Within the vast ocean of poetry he identified various currents: faggots, queers, sissies, freaks, butches, fairies, nymphs, and philenes. But the two major currents were faggots and queers. Walt Whitman, for example, was a faggot poet. Pablo Neruda, a queer. William Blake was definitely a faggot. Octavio Paz was a queer. Borges was a philene, or in other words he might be a faggot one minute and simply asexual the next.”

“Morini read the letter three times. With a heavy heart, he thought how wrong Norton was when she said her love and her ex-husband and everything they'd been through were behind her. Nothing is ever behind us.”

“He was an atheist and it had been years since he read a book, despite the fact that he had amassed a more than decent library of works in his specialty, as well as volumes of philosophy and Mexican history and a novel or two. Sometimes he thought it was precisely because he was an atheist that he didn't read anymore. Not reading, it might be said, was the highest expression of atheism or at least of atheism as he conceived of it. If you don't believe in God, how do you believe in a fucking book? he asked himself.”

“He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.”

“Espinoza experienced something similar, though slightly different in two respects. First, the need to be near Liz Norton struck some time before he got back to his apartment in Madrid. By the time he was on the plane he’d realized that she was the perfect woman, the one he’d always hoped to find, and he began to suffer. Second, among the ideal images of Norton that passed at supersonic speed through his head as the plane flew toward Spain at four hundred miles an hour, there were more sex scenes than Pelletier had imagined. Not many more, but more. (16)”