The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.

What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny?

I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.

There are places where the mind dies so that a truth which is its very denial may be born.

What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.