Even the contemplative life is only an effort, Nora my dear, to hide the body so the feet won’t stick out.

Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?

I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.

None of us suffers as much as we should, or loves as much as we say. Love is the first lie; wisdom the last.

“God,” she cried, “what is love? Man seeking his own head? The human head, so rented by misery that even the teeth weigh! She couldn't tell me the truth because she had never planned it; her life was a continual accident, and how can you be prepared for that? Everything we can't bear in this world, some day we find in one person, and love it all at once.”

The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.

Life, the permission to know death.