The Reunion Quotes
"Give me thy hand, thou fair and gentle creature! I am a friend, and come not to chastise."
"She wanted to tell him to fuck off, but she felt she could not say no to him."
"She needed to believe that something was finally going to happen in her life."
"On nights like tonight, when the wind howled, it was a very different place."
"The sheer rock face loomed dangerously; the olive and pine trees seemed to writhe in pain."
"The anticipation, the wild madness of love, the painful pleasure of being engulfed by the night."
"For twenty-five years, I’d lived—or tried to live—with this sword of Damocles hanging over my head."
"The discovery of the money changes everything!"
"Although the district of Alpes-Maritimes was historically right-wing, in recent years, residents had consistently voted for centrist, no-nonsense candidates."
"I was finally alone with Maxime. Now that he did not have to put up a front for the twins, he looked distraught."
"Despite the grim circumstances, I congratulated him. Maxime had achieved everything I had failed to: he’d started a family, built a career, was serving his community."
"Books tell us stories, they allow us to vicariously live out snippets of other lives, but they cannot take you in their arms and comfort you when you’re scared."
"At one time, I convinced myself that books might cure me of this feeling of ennui, but it is foolish to ask too much of books."
"Passion is a no-man’s-land, a bombed-out war zone situated somewhere at the intersection of sorrow, madness, and death."
"And passion has little if anything to do with love."
"But if my classes were excruciating, they were far from being the only source of my suffering."
"I was convinced that I was the right person for her, even if this was not the right time."
"I opened my mouth to scream, but Alexis had already picked up a broken bottle."
"It was a second that seemed to drag on for several minutes. A second that would change the course of many lives."
"I have often wondered about the nature of the hold Vinca had over me, the fascinating yet painful fever she triggered in me."
"Even as I was living them, I knew that these perfect moments were like bubbles. Always about to burst."
"To shake off my fears, to escape the present, I did what I had always done: I read novels."
"These novels did not heal me, but they briefly relieved me of the burden of being myself."
"Whenever I heard a car approaching, I was convinced the police had come to arrest me."
"We should not lower ourselves to wallow in mediocrity. It is an infectious disease."
"Everyone has three lives: a public life, a private life, and a secret life."
"Because I knew the official story was a lie."
"Books taught me at a young age that I would never be truly alone."
"All existence is a battle. Life is any victory that endures."
"Beauty was not simply physical, it was an intellectual experience, a nebulous power—it was sometimes unclear whether you were using it or it was using you."
"The gift of the novelist, isn’t it? To write fiction in order to confront reality. Not simply to put it right, but to fight it on its own ground. To analyze it, the better to refute it. To understand it so that, in good conscience, you can present a different world."
"Every possible activity was covered in detail. I flicked through the pages at random, dipping into the events that punctuated the monotony of school life."
"I felt that same frustration I had experienced at Dalanegra’s house, of being within a hairbreadth of the truth only to have it slip through my fingers."
"You have to understand one thing. This will work only if you do exactly what I tell you. No questions, no looking for reasons or explanations. That’s my only condition, but it is nonnegotiable."
"I knew that there exists a narrow path to happiness, but I could take it only with you by my side."
"To love and not be loved in return is the fate of many."
"I'm trying to find out whether an individual or a single company has made a significant donation toward the construction of the new buildings, the pool, and the gardens."
"There’s only one way to lie, Fanny, and that is to repudiate the truth, to obliterate the truth with your lie until, eventually, your lie becomes the truth."
"Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness."
"The strong and the weak are not always who you think they are. There are lots of people who wage private, painful wars."
"My name is Annabelle Degalais. I was born in Italy, in a little village in Piedmont, in the mid-1940s. At school, the other children called me the Austrian."
"Never allow yourself to be vulnerable. And that is my strength."
"It felt as though the thick fog that drowned my footsteps and blotted out the square, the curbs, and the road markings had washed away my moral compass, my every point of reference."
"This never-ending fall. This film noir in which I was more victim than hero."
"So I did what no one should ever do. I let down my guard."
"It was an insight that had cost her her life."
"The only tear in this perfect entity which is two women who love each other."
"Despite the threat of Pianelli’s book hanging over us, Maxime, Fanny, and I went on with our lives as though it didn’t exist."
"Our lives are fragile, at once precious and insignificant, sometimes bathed in icy waters of loneliness, sometimes in the warm stream of a fountain of youth."
"The ink-blackened pages accumulate. Gradually a story takes shape."