One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love - any love - reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

You've got to understand life, understand it when you're young.

One stops being a child when one realizes that telling one's trouble does not make it any better.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

Whatever people may say, the fastidious formal manner of the upper classes is preferable to the slovenly easygoing behaviour of the common middle class. In moments of crisis, the former know how to act, the latter become uncouth brutes.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.