And so I learned that familiar paths traced in the dusk of summer evenings may lead as well to prison as to innocent untroubled sleep.

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.

What made me run away was doubtless not so much the fear of settling down, but of settling down permanently in something ugly.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.

This is the century of fear.

Life is the result of all your choices.

Of course, true love is exceptional - two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.