Curiosity ran unchecked through him, like the wind outside through the deserted streets, along the canal, around the little wooden houses, everywhere, as far as the mountain.

Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?

poverty is like a pain, dormant and unbearable as long as you don't move about too much. You grow used to it, you end up by paying no attention to it. But once you presume to bring it out in the daylight, it becomes terrifying, you see it at last in all its squalor and you shrink from exposing it to the sun.

Of all things that can happen to us, triumph is the most difficult to endure when we are alone. Deprived of witnesses, it shrinks at once.

The more the heart is nourished with happiness, the more it is insatiable.

it's a funny life. Either you don't make a red cent and you have all the time in the world, or else you get double the money and you don't have a moment to spend a penny of it.

I felt the vulnerability, the fragility of the children of the world, and how it was, nonetheless, on their frail shoulders that we loaded the weight of our weary hopes and eternal new beginnings.