Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

For often I have wished to see a person again without realising that it was simply because that personal recalled to me a hedge of hawthorns in blossom, and I have been led to believe, and to make someone else believe, in a renewal of affection, by what was no more than an inclination to travel.

Your soul is a dark forest. But the trees are of a particular species, they are genealogical trees.

I find very reasonable the Celtic belief that the souls of our dearly departed are trapped in some inferior being, in an animal, aplant, an inanimate object, indeed lost to us until the day, which for some never arrives, when we find that we pass near the tree, or come to possess the object which is their prison. Then they quiver, call us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Freed by us, they have vanquished death and return to live with us.

The only possible paradises are those we have lost

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.