Every government has as much of a duty to avoid war as a ship's captain has to avoid a shipwreck.

And taking her friend’s hand, she put it on her breast, on that firm round covering of a woman’s heart which the male often finds so satisfying that he makes no attempt to find what lies beneath it.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.

Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.

History, that excitable and unreliable old lady.

Whatever one wishes to say, there is one noun only by which to express it, one verb only to give it life, one adjective only which will describe it. One must search until one has discovered them, this noun, this verb, this adjective, and never rest content with approximations, never resort to trickery, however happy, or to vulgarism, in order to dodge the difficulty.