Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.

Nothing in the world is worth turning one's back on what one loves.

When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.

I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.

It is easier to kill what we do not know.

If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.

Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.