Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.

Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.

And nevertheless, when they watched him leave the house, this man they themselves had urged to conquer the world, then they were the ones left with the terror that he would never return. That was their life. Love, if it existed, was something separate: another life.

Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

He spent six hours examining things, trying to find a difference from their appearance on the previous day in the hope of discovering in them some change that would reveal the passage of time.

My most important problem was destroying the lines of demarcation that separate what seems real from what seems fantastic.

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband.