What's given, in fact, always depends on the person or thing it's given to. A minor incident in the street brings the cook to the door and entertains him more than I would be entertained by contemplating the most original idea, by reading the greatest book, or by having the most gratifying of useless dreams. If life is basically monotony, he has escaped it more than I. And he escapes it more easily than I. The truth isn't with him or with me, because it isn't with anyone, but happiness does belong to him.

...the painful intensity of my sensations, even when they're happy ones; the blissful intensity of my sensations, even when they're sad.

Direct experience is the evasion, or hiding place of those devoid of imagination.

I've reached the point where tedium is a person, the incarnate fiction of my own company.

Every spoken word double-crosses us. The written word is the only tolerable form of communication, as it isn't a stone in a bridge between souls but a ray of light between stars.

The inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart.

I don't mourn the loss of my childhood; I mourn because everything, including (my) childhood, is lost.