Just as someone in pain is linked by his groans to the present moment (and is entirely outside past and future), so someone bursting out in such ecst… - Milan Kundera

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance.

It was time laid bare, time in and of itself, time at its most basic and primal, and it forced me to call it by its true name (for now I was living pure time — pure, vacant time) so as not to forget it for a moment, keep it constantly before me, and feel its weight.

He yearned to step out of his life the way one steps out of a house into the street.