The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.

The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting.

All intimacies are based on differences.

The superiority of one man's opinion over another's is never so great as when the opinion is about a woman.

A swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see--that’s my idea of happiness.

She had always been fond of history, and here [in Rome] was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine.