If you live in a place for long you cease to read about it.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

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.

A brain is only capable of what it could conceive, andit couldnt concieve what it hasnt experienced

All the emotions have something in common. People are quite aware of the sorrow there always is in lust, but they are not so aware of the lust there is in sorrow.

That instinct for human character that is perhaps inherent in an imaginative writer.

The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.