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.

The denigration of those we love always detaches us from them in some degree. Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers.

Talent is a long patience.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

If you knew all the dreams I've dreamed!

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

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.