. . . The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation-a book should serve as an axe for the frozen sea within us.

Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.

There was once a community of scoundrels, that is to say, they were not scoundrels, but ordinary people.

What is meant by its nature for the highest and the best, spreads among the lowly people.

You, who can't do anything, think you can bring off something like that? How can you even dare to think about it? If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn't be in need of it.

The old incapacity. Interrupted my writing for barely ten days and already cast out. Once again prodigious efforts stand before me. You have to dive down, as it were, and sink more rapidly than that which sinks in advance of you.

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.