Last night, before falling asleep, she had realized winter was almost over.

There are nights when dreams run stories one into another...

Ignacio Abel stopped in his tracks when, through the hubbub of Penn Station, he heard someone calling his name.

Spreading out like a dense forest, shaking and rippling like a field of corn combed by the north wind, a hypnotic wave, a river above craggy peaks, the flock is like a cloud-filled sky when a storm is…

Stop! Stop! Will you stop once and for all! What's wrong with this imbecile, darling? Stooooop!

Little Lotte, as he liked to call her, was a robust Norwegian measuring five foot ten in stocking feet, six foot three in her skates.

He had bought two ice creams and with a sad look on his face was offering them to her so she could choose.

Much in the same way that for thirty years he's been incapable of breaking the rules, today he just doesn't see himself having the heart to comply with them.

There was a time when my only passions were poverty and rain.

I'm so alone. Roberto. (91) 3077670.

The love you didn't expect is always more pure.

I had to die to find out whether anybody loved me. When alive, I was never very popular, and it was a real problem for me that I fought very vigorously and quite without success. At home, if I didn’t…

Perhaps because I'd smelled this coming, I didn't try to fight back.

The man faces the mirror. He has just shaved and taken a shower.

We had quarreled earlier and I was almost in tears when he was buying the tickets.

Eduard, God doesn't play dice . . . he usually declares when we find ourselves up a blind alley or suddenly have a stroke of good luck.

In this bedroom devoid of furniture / and unpolluted the action is set.

Being a couple is twice the fun.

The man is looking for trouble,

To think that by just using her imagination, they could all be hers, bores her stiff.

On the spot where I write all this hodgepodge of verses /      stands Edward Hopper,

Him. You. The same pauses.

Our Father who is on earth, / where you reign over your glory and your hell,

And old maids are always having it out with their dogs, / married men with their mistresses,

For though I'm small, I know many things,

That same history / that kissed the flags in order to make off with them, / brought me your body.

Poetry is useless, it serves only / to behead a king / or seduce a young woman.

Whoever approaches my house / will find a day / that is completely Friday.

The girl is petrified. And I know that the man who has drowned in the reservoir is our father.

Then I shouted: Oh alas! and Alas, my burning heart. I fled from the universe and here I am in it. Where is what I seek?

she flew up, flustered, hovering, / circling round her lover. 

If He kills me still I will trust in Him.

Now she walked a step behind him, looking at everything suspiciously with her new, cold eyes, but without venturing a word.

The following is an extract from Diálogos de Salamina: un paseo por el cine y la literatura (Tusquets, 2003), a book of conversations between Javier Cercas, author of Soldiers of Salamis, and David Trueba,…

Don't get him started, the barkeeper warned them in a whisper.

The fact that Berlin was surrounded by walls didn't discourage anyone: it gave the city the symbolic quality of dreams that so many other places lack.

Surveying the men near him to see which ones looked more athletically inclined, he selected the members of a prospective rescue party.