Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move andwe live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.

Memory nourishes the heart, and grief abates.

If only for the sake of elegance, I try to remain morally pure.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

In reality, in love there is a permanent suffering which joy neutralizes, renders virtual delays, but which can at any moment become what it would have become long earlier if one had not obtained what one wanted -- atrocious.

At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations, there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring by fits and starts.

What a profound significance small things assume when the woman we love conceals them from us.