So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

There are two main human sins from which all the others derive: impatience and indolence. It was because of impatience that they were expelled from Paradise; it is because of indolence that they do not return. Yet perhaps there is only one major sin: impatience. Because of impatience they were expelled, because of impatience they do not return.

At that point I asked myself: How is it that she is not amazed at herself, that she keeps her lips closed and makes no such remark?

We live in an age which is so possessed by demons, that soon we shall only be able to do goodness and justice in the deepest secrecy, as if it were a crime.

There's no quiet place here on earth for our love, not in the village and not anywhere else, so I picture a grave, deep and narrow, in which we embrace as if clamped together, I bury my face against you, you yours against me, and no one will ever see us.

Suffering is the positive element in this world, indeed it is the only link between this world and the positive.