Memories of My Melancholy Whores

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete system of pretense invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature. I discovered that I am not disciplined out of virtue but as a reaction to my negligence, that I appear generous in order to conceal my meanness, that I pass myself off as prudent because I am evil-minded, that I am conciliatory in order not to succumb to my repressed rage, that I am punctual only to hide how little I care about other people’s time. I learned, in short, that love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

No matter what, nobody can take away the dances you've already had.

The adolescents of my generation, greedy for life, forgot in body and soul about their hopes for the future until reality taught them that tomorrow was not what they had dreamed, and they discovered nostalgia.

Age isn't how old you are but how old you feel.

I would not have traded the delights of my suffering for anything in the world.

Morality, too, is a question of time.

No matter what you do this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever.

Just as real events are forgotten, some that never were can be in our memories as if they happened.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.

Make no mistake: peaceful madmen are ahead of the future.

As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance.

I always had understood that dying of love was mere poetic license.

Ah, me, if this is love, then how it torments.

...the invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited, not happy love

Love is not a condition of the spirit but a sign of the zodiac.

Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.

And again, as always, after so many years we were still in the same place we always were.

I never had intimate friends, and the few who came close are in New York. By which I mean they're dead, because that's where I suppose condemned souls go in order not to endure the truth of their past lives.

The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.

The only Virgos left in the world are people like you who were born in August.

I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.

Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love

For a week I did not take off my mechanic's coverall day or night I did not bathe or shave or brush my teeth because love taught me too late that you groom yourself for someone you dress and perfume yourself for someone and I'd never had anyone to do that for.

Descubrí que mi obsesión de que cada cosa estuviera en su puesto, cada asunto en su tiempo, cada palabra en su estilo, no era el premio merecido de una mente en orden, sino al contrario, todo un sistema de simulación inventado por mí para ocultar el desorden de mi naturaleza. Descubrí que no soy disciplinado por virtud, sino como reacción contra mi negligencia; que parezco generoso por encubrir mi mezquindad, que me paso de prudente por mal pensado, que soy conciliador para no sucumbir a mis cóleras reprimidas, que sólo soy puntual para que no se sepa cuan poco me importa el tiempo ajeno. Descubrí, en fin, que el amor no es un estado del alma sino un signo del zodíaco.

Blood circulated through her veins with the fluidity of a song that branched off into the most hidden areas of her body and returned to her heart, purified by love. Before I left at dawn I drew the lines of her hand on a piece of paper and gave it to Diva Sahibí for a reading so I could know her soul.

This was when I heard that the first symptom of old age is when you begin to resemble your father.