The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.

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 . . .

Never have nights been more beautiful than these nights of anxiety. In the sky have been shining in trinity the moon, Venus and Mars. Nature has been more splendid than man.

[On World War II:] The war, which destroyed so much of everything, was also constructive, in a way. It established clearly the cold, and finally unhypocritical fact that the most important thing on earth to men today is money.

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

The older women were Sunbeams and I guess we were Cherubs or Lambs, but our mothers were Nightingales.