I am poor - obscure - just eighteen years of age - with a rapacious appetite for everything and principles as light as my purse.

Oh, how quickly things changed! Why didn't happiness last for ever? For ever wasn't a bit too long.

Everything in life that we really accept undergoes a change.

If only one could tell true love from false love as one can tell mushrooms from toadstools.

I want to be all that I am capable of becoming.

there does seem to me something sad in life. It is hard to say what it is. I don't mean the sorrow that we all know, like illness and poverty and death. No, it is something different. It is there, deep down, deep down, part of one, like one's breathing.

What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly, by a feeling of bliss - absolute bliss - as though you'd suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle into every finger and toe?