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

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.

The search for a new personality is futile; what is fruitful is the interest the old personality can take in new activities.

We commit two wrongs when we fail to right a wrong.

Childhood is not only the childhood we really had but also the impressions we formed of it in our adolescence and maturity. That is why childhood seems so long. Probably every period of life is multiplied by our reflections upon the next.

The only joy in the world is to begin.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.