Is despair wrong? Isn’t it the natural condition of life after a certain age? … After a number of events, what is there left but repetition and diminishment? Who wants to go on living? The eccentric, the religious, the artistic (sometimes); those with a false sense of their own worth. Soft cheeses collapse; firm cheeses endurate. Both go mouldy.

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice.

When you read a great book, you don't escape from life, you plunge deeper into it.

Reading is a majority skill but a minority art.

Time...give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

we must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death

To look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective: this gives us a psychic shock.