Talent is a long patience.

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

Love, she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts and lightnings,--a hurricane of the skies, which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into the abyss.

I do not like to "interest" the public with myself.

He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust — dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.

Beautiful things spoil nothing.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.