It rained for four years, eleven months, and two days. There were periods of drizzle during which everyone put on his full dress and a convalescent look to celebrate the clearing, but people soon grew accustomed to interpret the pauses as a sign of redoubled rain.

When you have a healthy appetite there is no such thing as bad bread.

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

After seven days at sea, thirst is a feeling unto itself; it's a deep pain in the throat, in the sternum, and especially beneath the clavicles. And it's also the fear of suffocating.

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

A person does not belong to a place until there is someone dead under the ground.

Lost in the solitude of his immense power, he began to lose direction.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.