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Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?

"Why must everything be repeat and repeat, never finish, never resting? You work so hard one day, but the next day, you must only work again. You eat, but the next day, you are already hungry. You find love, then love go away. You are born with nothing-no watch, no T-shirt. You work hard, then you die with nothing-no watch, no T-shirt. You are young, then you are old. No matter how hard you work, you cannot stop getting old."

It's still two human beings trying to get along, so it's going to become complicated. And love is always complicated. But still humans must try to love each other, darling. We must get our hearts broken sometimes. This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.

Somewhere in me I am able to recognize that this is not my melancholy; this is the city's own indigenous melancholy, and I am healthy enough these days to be able to feel the difference between me and it.

Guilt's just your ego's way of tricking you into thinking that you're making moral progress. Don't fall for it, my dear."

There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter’s seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth—it was just life, that was all

They were stalled at the lights, a single driver in every car, the cars themselves like steel shells they’d extruded to contain their resentments

Bernal Díaz can save both is through memory. He is the first Mexican writer, the one who initiated the Spanish-language narrative tradition of the New World

‘I am a libertine, but I am neither a delinquent nor an assassin.’

the greatest moment of love is separation, loneliness, the melancholy of remembrance