You only have one life, but if you live it well, that’s enough. The only reality is now, today. What are you waiting for to be happy?
It bothers them that instead of taking on the role of abandoned lover, I have become a happy wife. They relish seeing strong women like you and me humiliated. They cannot forgive us that we triumphed where so many others fail... Courage is a virtue appreciated in a male but considered a defect in our gender. Bold women are a threat to a world that is out of balance, in favor of men. That is why they work so hard to mistreat and destroy us.
I was a romantic and sentimental creature, with a tendency towards solitude.
There are a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It’s the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that’s why they get noticed.
Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love.
She felt that everything was made of glass, as fragile as a sigh.
What can we do with this happiness that appears for no obvious reason, the joy that needs no cause to exist?
As I travel through life, I gather experiences that lie imprinted on the deepest strata of memory, and there they ferment, are transformed, and sometimes rise to the surface and sprout like strange plants from other worlds. What is the fertile humus of the subconscious composed of? Why are certain images converted into recurrent themes in nightmares or writing?
Her Uncle Jaime felt that people never read what did not interest them and that if it interested them that meant they were sufficiently mature to read it.
The point was not to die, since death came anyway, but to survive, which would be a miracle.
She treated him with the casual kindness usually reserved for other people’s pets.
Because I have time to spare, and for the first time in my life nobody expects anything of me. I don’t have to prove anything, I’m not rushing everywhere; each day is a gift I enjoy to the fullest.
Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is optional.
Todos tenemos demonios en los rincones oscuros del alma, pero si los sacamos a la luz, los demonios se achican, se debilitan, se callan y al fin nos dejan en paz.
We are all born happy. Life gets us dirty along the way, but we can clean it up. Happiness is not exuberant or noisy, like pleasure or joy; it’s silent, tranquil, and gentle; it’s a feeling of satisfaction inside that begins with self-love. You need to love yourself as I do, as all those who know you do, especially Alma’s grandson.
I especially like your autumn trees, gracefully letting their leaves fall. That is how I would like to shed my own leaves in this autumn of life, easily and elegantly. Why be so attached to what we are bound to lose anyway? I suppose I mean youth, which has been so present in our conversations.
Death, with its ancestral weight of terrors, is merely the abandonment of an unserviceable shell at the time the spiritis reintegrated into the unified energy of the cosmos. The end of life, like birth, is a stagein a voyage, and deserves the compassion we accord to its beginnings. There is absolutely no virtue in prolonging the heartbeat and tremors of a body beyond its natural span...
The last time I was in Chile, I was hypnotized by a friend who is studying to be a curandero, a healer, who led me back through several incarnations. It wasn’t easy to return to the present, however, since my friend hadn’t reached that part of the course, but the experiment was well worth the effort because I discovered that in former lives I was not Genghis Khan, as my mother believes.
He knew that her body was his to engage in all the acrobatics he had learned in the books he kept hidden in a corner of his library, but with Clara even the most abominable contortions were like the thrashings of a newborn; it was impossible to spice them up with the salt of evil or the pepper of submission.
The advantage of being lovers is that we have to work hard at our relationship, because everything conspires to drive us apart. Our decision to be together has to be renewed again and again; that keeps us on our toes.