Youth cannot imagine romance apart from youth.

Whatever does not pretend at all has style enough.

Men were just like sheep, and nothing was easier than for women to set up as shepherds and pen them up in a field.

So long as we can lose any happiness, we possess some.

This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime - he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable.

Mothers see the angel in us because the angel is there. If it's shown to the mother, the son has got an angel to show, hasn't he? When a son cuts somebody's throat the mother only sees it's possible for a misguided angel to act like a devil - and she's entirely right about that!

Boyhood is the longest time in life for a boy. The last term of the school-year is made of decades, not of weeks, and living through them is like waiting for the millennium.