With her Florentino Ariza learned what he had already experienced many times without realizing it that one can be in love with several people at the same time feel the same sorrow with each and not betray any of them. Alone in the midst of the crowd on the pier he said to himself in a flash of anger My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse.

But that afternoon he asked himself with his infinite capacity for illusion if such pitiless indifference might not be a subterfuge for hiding the torments of love.

Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace not the means to anything but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.

To him she seemed so beautiful so seductive so different from ordinary people that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones why no one elses heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid the flight of her hands the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures not one of the indications of her character but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.