There is only one good thing in life, and that is love.

The past attracts me, the present frightens me, because the future is death.

She was a sweet girl but not really pretty, a rough sketch of a woman with a little of everything in her, one of those silhouettes which artists draw in three strokes on the tablecloth in a café after dinner, between a glass of brandy and a cigarette. Nature sometimes turns out creatures like that.

A sick thought can devour the body's flesh more than fever or consumption.

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

If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.

Solitude is indeed dangerous for a working intelligence. We need to have around us people who think and speak. When we are alone for a long time we people the void with phantoms