What is it with me? Am I absolutely nobody, but merely inordinately vain? I do not know…. But I am most fearfully unhappy. That is all. I am so unhappy that I wish I was dead—yet I should be mad to die when I have not yet lived at all.

I am going to enjoy life in Paris I know. It is so human and there is something noble in the city... It is a real city, old and fine and life plays in it for everybody to see.

In the woods where snow is thick, bars of sunlight lay like pale fire.

I don't believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I am while I'm working. How could they be? Writers would have to live in trees.

In the shortest sea voyage there is no sense of time. You have been down in the cabin for hours or days or years. Nobody knows or cares. You know all the people to the point of indifference. You do not believe in dry land any more - you are caught in the pendulum itself, and left there, idly swinging.

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

It is of immense importance to learn to laugh at ourselves.