Life is a very bad novelist. It is chaotic and ludicrous. - Javier Marías

Everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest, straightforward stories, you just have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history.

...she kept her arm raised and thus allowed me to observe her armpit, and when a naked woman allows you to do that, uncovering one or both, it's as if she were offering up to you an additional nakedness.

...and a little later comes the question that no one asks before acting or before speaking: 'Do I dare disturb the universe?', because everyone dares to do just that, to disturb the universe and to trouble it, with their small, quick tongues and their ill-intentioned steps.