Each day the worst of our faults, our deficiencies, our crimes, the truth of our lives, is stifled under a triple layer of forgetfulness, death and the ordinary course of justice.

Oh God, if you want women to never again raise their voices, then create an adult man!

If two people who love each other let a single instant wedge itself between them, it grows-it becomes a month, a year, a century; it becomes to late.

I believe in the gods; or rather I believe that I believe in the gods. But I don't believe that they are great brooding presences watching over us; I believe they are completely absent minded.

Who would prefer peace to the glory of hunger and thirst, of wading through mud, and dying in the service of one's country?

A man has only one way of being immortal on earth: he has to forget he is a mortal.

To make ourselves invisible to creditors or to the envious, and even to our own worries, we can take advantage here on earth of a great democratic institution-in fact, democracy's only success-the night.