The only paradise is paradise lost.

After a certain age our memories are so intertwined with one another that what we are thinking of, the book we are reading, scarcely matters any more. We have put something of ourselves everywhere, everything is fertile, everything is dangerous, and we can make discoveries no less precious than in Pascal's Pensées in an advertisement for soap.

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

We pack the physical outline of the creature we see with all the ideas we have already formed about him, and in the complete picture of him we compose in our minds those ideas have certainly the principal place.

We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison.

Women who are to some extent resistant, whom one cannot possess at once, whom one does not even know at first whether one will ever possess, are the only interesting ones.