"Let me stay here," he said. "There was soap." - Gabriel García Márquez

The world was reduced to the surface of her skin and her inner self was safe from all bitterness.

He said that people who loved [animals] to excess were capable of the worst cruelties toward human beings. He said that dogs were not loyal but servile, that cats were opportunists and traitors, that peacocks were heralds of death, that macaws were simply decorative annoyances, that rabbits fomented greed, that monkeys carried the fever of lust, and that roosters were damned because they had been complicit in the three denials of Christ.

One could be happy not only without love, but despite it.