He thought about his people without sentimentality, with a strict closing of his accounts with life, beginning to understand how much he really loved the people he hated most.

Wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end.

If men gave birth, they'd be less inconsiderate.

Fatality makes us invisible.

It was, at last, real life, with my heart safe and condemned to die of happy love in the joyful agony of any day after my hundredth birthday.

The anxiety of falling in love could not find repose except in bed.

When I wake up," he said, "remind me that I'm going to marry her.