Memoirs give the knowledge about the author and his environment. They are different from biography. Memoirs do not get ahead, and the man who writes a biography looks at his future like at a very simple thing.

Hopes are like hair ornaments. Girls want to wear too many of them. When they become old women they look silly wearing even one.

I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.

Here again, I saw life in all its noisy excitement passing me by.

In the instant before the door opened, I could almost sense my life expanding just like a river whose waters have begun to swell; for I had never before taken such a drastic step to change the course of my own future. I was like a child tiptoeing along a precipice overlooking the sea. And yet somehow I hadn't imagined a great wave might come and strike me there, and wash everything away.

Sadness was a very heavy thing.

Flowers that grow where old ones have withered serve to remind us that death will one day come to us all.