What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air--a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

God is only a word dreamed up to explain the world

One's duty is to feel what is great, cherish the beautiful, and to not accept the conventions of society with the ignominy that it imposes upon us.

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