One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That’s the only thing you should be trying to control.

Stefanie de Vincennes intoxicated me four years ago; but I was besotted with her, crawling with love like lice.

What is it you understand, Florita? asked Sergio. Don’t tell, Florita, said Reinaldo. When a person speaks, his joys and sorrows shine through, even if only in part, wouldn’t you say? That’s God’s truth, said Jose Patricio. Well, when these figments of mine speak among themselves, even though Id on’t understand their words, I can tell for a fact that their joys and sorrows are big, said Florita.

What makes them interesting to us?” asked his editor.
“Stupidity,” said Fate. “The endless variety of ways we destroy ourselves.

Exile must be a terrible thing,” said Norton sympathetically.
“Actually,” said Amalfitano, “now I see it as a natural movement, something that, in its way, helps to abolish fate, or what is generally thought of as fate.

The first impression the critics had of Amalfitano was mostly negative, perfectly in keeping with the mediocrity of the place, except that the place, the sprawling city in the desert, could be seen as something authentic, something full of local color, more evidence of the often terrible richness of the human landscape,

He had some flaws…but overall, according to Vanessa, he was a good person who almost never got angry about anything, and when he did, he wasn’t violent or cruel like other men but instead melancholy sad, filled with sorrow in the face of a world that suddenly struck him as overwhelming and incomprehensible.

When he got up to shake hands, it occurred to both Espinoza and Pelletier that he must be gay.
“That faggot is the closest thing to an eel I’ve ever seen,” Espinoza said afterward, as they strolled through Hamburg.

words that to the little gaucho sounded like the moon, like the passage of clouds across the mood, like a slow storm,

In fact the apprehension that our life together will decreasingly be the center of my ever day seemed today on Lexington Avenue so distinct a betrayal that I lost all sense of oncoming traffic.

Had I been operating from my rational mind I would not have been entertaining fantasies that would not have been out of place at an Irish wake. I would not for example have experienced, when I heard that Julia Child had died, so distinct a relief, so marked a sense that this was finally working out: John and Julia Child could have dinner together (this had been my immediate thought), she could cook, he could ask her about the OSS, they would amuse each other, like each other.

We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.