At great periods you have always felt, deep within you, the temptation to commit suicide. You gave yourself to it, breached your own defenses. You were a child. The idea of suicide was a protest against life; by dying, you would escape this longing for death.

Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends

Woman gives herself as a prize to the weak and as a prop to the strong and no man ever has what he should.

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

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

Reality is a prison, where one vegetates and always will. All the rest - thought, action - is just a pastime, mental or physical. What counts then, is to come to grips with reality. The rest can go.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.