She took kisses like so many coats of paint […] how long and how vainly I searched for excuses which might make her amorality if not palatable at lest understandable. I realize now the time I wasted in this way; instead of enjoying her and turning aside from these preoccupations with the thought, ‘She is untrustworthy as she is beautiful. She takes love as plants do water, lightly, thoughtlessly.

Truth disappears with the telling of it.

Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.

History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

Let us define 'man' as a poet perpetually conspiring against himself.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.