Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.

Before her marriage she had thought that she had love within her grasp; but since the happiness which she had expected this love to bring her hadn’t come, she supposed she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to imagine just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “rapture” - words that had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.

She was the amoureuse of all the novels, the heroine of all the plays, the vague “she” of all the poetry books.

How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.