You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my "life has been wasted" here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.

The entire being of a woman is a secret which should be kept.

I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity . I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.

A poet's mission is to make others confound fiction and reality in order to render them, for an hour, mysteriously happy.

I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.

The air was cold to the lungs, the long grass dripping wet, and the herbs on it gave out their spiced astringent scent. In a little while on all sides the Cicada would begin to sing. The grass was me , and the air, the distant invisible mountains were me, the tired oxen were me. I breathed with the slight night-wind in the thorn trees.