Words do not change their meanings so drastically in the course of centuries as, in our minds, names do in the course of a year or two.

We are at times too ready to believe that the present is the only possible state of things.

Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

Illness is the most heeded of doctors: to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain we obey.

Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.

Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamoured for it.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.