we can surmount the anger we feel. To find oneself like a young tree inside a tomb is to discover the power to crack the tomb and grow up to any height.

Writers do not find subjects; subjects find them.

Proust has pointed out that the predisposition to love creates its own objects; is this not also true of fear?

Intimacies between women often go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending in small talk.

one should discuss one's difficulties only when they are over.

Meetings that do not come off keep a character of their own. They stay as they were projected.

Dress has never been at all a straightforward business: so much subterranean interest and complex feeling attaches to it. As a topic ... it has a flowery head but deep roots in the passion. On the subject of dress almost no one, for one or another reason, feels truly indifferent: if their own clothes do not concern them, somebody else's do. ... Ten minutes talk about clothes (except between perfect friends) tends to make everyone present either overbearing, guarded or touchy.