You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.

Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life.

Only the united beat of sex and heart together can create ecstasy.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Not afraid of poverty and drabness and who is untouched by it, untouched by the drunkenness of her friends; (she) who judges, selects, discards people with severity, who knows, when she is telling her endless anecdotes, that they are ways of escape, keeping herself all the more secret behind that profuse talk.

The city was asleep on its right side and shaking with violent nightmares. Long puffs of snoring came out of the chimneys. Its feet were sticking out because the clouds did not cover it altogether. There was a hole in them and the white feathers were falling out. The city had untied all its bridges like so many buttons to feel at ease. Wherever there was a lamplight the city scratched itself until it went out.

Sometimes I think of Paris not as a city but as a home.