By jove, no wonder women don't love war nor understand it, nor can operate in it as a rule; it takes a man to suffer what other men have invented . . .

She had storms all her life, but she died peacefully.

She died with a knife in her hand in her kitchen, where she had cooked for fifty years, and the death was solemnly listed in the newspaper as that of an artist.

The German passion for bureaucracy -- for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist -- is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . .

... people who don't want something are less likely to get it than people who do want something.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

Genius is a talent only for living, those who possess it have little gift for dying.