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,

Sometimes, however, as they sat on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who’ve just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn’t more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats.

The truth is like a strung out pimp in the middle of a storm.