Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

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

There is an art in taking the whiplash of suffering full in the face, an art you must learn. Let each single attack exhaust itself; pain always makes single attacks, so that its bite may be more intense, more concentrated. And you, while its fangs are implanted and injecting their venom at one spot, do not forget to offer it another place where it can bite you, and so relieve the pain of the first.

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

To know the world, one must construct it

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.

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