Amar significa nunca tener que decir lo siento.
Love means never having to say you’re sorry.
Professors of classics – not even a professor of English – professors of classics, they’re something sacred; it’s almost like being a priest.
Quiet heroism or youthful idealism, or both? What do we know? That life without heroism and idealism is not worth living – or that either can be fatal?
What can you say about a twenty-five-year-old girl who died?
This isn’t a watercolor, it’s a mural.
It takes someone very special to help you forget someone very special.
Sometimes I amaze even myself.
The ‘equilibrium’ that people see in me is really an illusion. I am as flawed as anyone. It’s only that I seem to have the knack of hiding.
What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.
Something may have been lost in translation, but it certainly wasn’t love.
There was a brief silence. I think I heard snow falling.
The pain of not knowing what to do was exceeded only by that of knowing what I had done.
Please, if one of us cries, let both of us cry. But preferably neither of us.
Part of being a big winner is the ability to be a big loser. There is no paradox involved. It is a distinctly Harvard thing to be able to turn any defeat into victory.
I began to think about God. I mean, the notion of a Supreme Being existing somewhere began to creep into my private thoughts. Not because I wanted to strike Him on the face, to punch Him out for what He was about to do to me – to Jenny, that is. No, the kind of religious thoughts I had were just the opposite. Like, when I woke up in the morning and Jenny was there. Still there. I’m sorry, embarrassed even, but I hoped there was a God I could say thank you to.
Although champagne was served, the mood was curiously subdued. After this reunion, they would probably never meet together as a class again – at least not in such numbers. They would spend the next decades reading obituaries of the men who had started out in 1954 as rivals and today were leaving Harvard as brothers. This was the beginning of the end. They had met once more and just had time enough to learn that they liked one another. And to say goodbye.
It scarcely made a column of newspaper space, but it wrote headlines in their lives.
They glanced at one another like tigers taking measure of a menacing new rival. But in this kind of jungle you could never be sure where the real danger lurked.
Do you have The Waning of the Middle Ages?” She shot a glance up at me. “Do you have your own library?” she asked.