The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men's pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

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

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

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

When we read, we are not looking for new ideas, but to see our own thoughts given the seal of confirmation on the printed page. The words that strike us are those that awake an echo in a zone we have already made our own—the place where we live—and the vibration enables us to find fresh starting points within ourselves

A corpse is what's left after waking too often.