You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence.

The condemned social order has not been built up on paper and ink, and I don't fancy that a combination of paper and ink will ever put an end to it.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Certain streets have an atmosphere of their own, a sort of universal fame and the particular affection of their citizens. One of such streets is the Cannebiere, and the jest: "If Paris had a Cannebiere, it would be a little Marseilles" is the jocular expression of municipal pride. I, too, I have been under the spell. For me it has been a street leading into the unknown.

Only in men's imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Youth is insolent; it is its right - its necessity; it has got to assert itself, and all assertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence.

For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.