Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that's the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.

And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.

There is not a particle of life which does not bear poetry within it

DOCTOR. Always preceded by 'The good'. Among men, in familiar conversation, 'Oh! balls, doctor!' Is a wizard when he enjoys your confidence, a jack-ass when you're no longer on terms. All are materialists: 'you can't probe for faith with a scalpel.'

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

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