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.

Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror

As humanity perfects itself, man becomes degraded. When everything is reduced to the mere counter-balancing of economic interests, what room will there be for virtue? When Nature has been so subjugated that she has lost all her original forms, where will that leave the plastic arts? And so on. In the mean time, things are going to get very murky.

I have dreamed much and have done very little.

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