It’s hard to communicate anything exactly and that’s why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.

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.

Through small apertures we glimpse abysses whose sombre depths turn us faint. And yet over the whole there hovers an extraordinary tenderness.

Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.