The last moments slipped by, one by one, irretrievable.

The writer is the Faust of modern society, the only surviving individualist in a mass age. To his orthodox contemporaries he seems a semi-madman.

You and I, it's as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together, to see if we know what we were taught.

How wonderful to be alive, he thought. But why does it always hurt?

No single man makes history. History cannot be seen, just as one cannot see grass growing. Wars and revolutions, kings and Robespierres, are history's organic agents, its yeast. But revolutions are made by fanatical men of action with one-track mind, geniuses in their ability to confine themselves to a limited field. They overturn the old order in a few hours or days, the whole upheaval takes a few weeks or at most years, but the fanatical spirit that inspired the upheavals is worshiped for decades thereafter, for centuries.

She was here on earth to make sense of its wild enchantments.

Love is not weakness. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage can contain it.