You have a right to experiment with your life. You will make mistakes. And they are right too.

Houses turn to corpses overnight when we cease to live and love in them.

There is no denying that we are suffering from a collective neurosis and the novel which does not face this is not a novel of our time.

Again I take a taxi to Clichy address, but feel that I do not want to go on loving Henry more actively than he loves me (having realized that nobody will ever love me in that overabundant, overexpressive, overthoughtful, overhuman way I love people), and so I will wait for him. So I ask taxi driver to drop me at the Galeries Lafayette, where I begin to look for a new hat and to shop for Christmas. Pride? I don't know. A kind of wise retreat. I need people too much. So I bury my gigantic defect, my overflow of love, under trivialities, like a child. I amuse myself with a new hat.

Someone told me the delightful story of the crusader who put a chastity belt on his wife and gave the key to his best friend for safekeeping, in case of his death. He had ridden only a few miles away when his friend, riding hard, caught up with him, saying 'You gave me the wrong key!

I am like a snake who has already bitten. I retreat from a direct battle while knowing the slow effect of the poison.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.