We swung between madness and suicide ... it was beautiful!

When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women

As you get older, the heart shed its leaves like a tree. You cannot hold out against certain winds. Each day tears away a few more leaves; and then there are the storms that break off several branches at one go. And while nature’s greenery grows back again in the spring, that of the heart never grows back.

She loved the sea for its storms alone, cared for vegetation only when it grew here and there among ruins. She had to extract a kind of personal advantage from things and she rejected as useless everything that promised no immediate gratification — for her temperament was more sentimental than artistic, and what she was looking for was emotions, not scenery.

The principal thing in the world is to keep the soul aloft.

May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!

I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.