You don't know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.