There is a fear of voluptuousness that is itself voluptuous, just as a certain fear of death can itself be deadly.

A moving shadow means more to us than a body at rest. We are no longer taken in by a fixed grin. We know that only death has a rictus.

A lot of truths about the living world are recorded in bad books; they are just badly written about.

I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish.

Only the small things in life are important

That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.

I believe that my observations have always led me to find that the so-called realist moves about the world with a closed mind, ringed as it were with concrete and cement, and that the so-called romantic is like an unfenced garden in and out of which truth can wander at will.