Book #3 - The Confessions of Max Tivoli
"We are each the love of someone's life"
"I wish every night was just starlight and candles and nothing to do. We would have so much time."
"I supposed I was not the first to make a mess of love, but it never matters, does it?"
"When we are very young, we try to live on what can never be enough."
"It takes too much imagination to see the sorrows of people we take for happy. Their real battles take place, like those of the stars, in some realm of light imperceptible to the human eye. It is a feat of the mind to guess another's heart."
"Age will tell you what a woman is; if she has never been happy, you will know it from her eyes."
"We are not ourselves when we are sick. We function at the most basic level, are ugly, miserable, and all our ordinary charms that seem to come so naturally to us fall away, and more than anything else we resemble either ourselves as children, crying for a drink of water, or our parents on their deathbeds, mumbling a prayer. Too weary to keep up the brittle artifice of ourself, we shed it, like the locust, and become, in public, the sand and inconsolable adult that we so often are in private, which is to say: our true self."
"She was like no one you will ever meet. Strong, independent. I never took her for granted for a moment, or pretended I understood her, and when she wanted to go I let her go, because she was art and she was music."
"She became a new person behind the camera."
"She made me younger, year by year."
"Are you happy?" Alice asked me.
How can anyone answer this, at any moment?