Innocence is a kind of insanity

If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought.

One's life is more formed, I sometimes think, by books than by human beings: it is out of books one learns about love and pain at second hand.

The subject of a novel is not the plot. Who remembers what happened to Lucien de Rebempre in the end?

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

So much of life [is] a putting-off of unhappiness for another time. Nothing [is] ever lost by delay.