Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

The duty and the task of a writer are those of an interpreter.

None of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others. Even the very simple act that we call "seeing a person we know" is in part an intellectual one. We fill the physical appearance of the individual we see with all the notions we have about him, and of the total picture that we form for ourselves, these notions certainly occupy the greater part.

Pleasures are like photographs: in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present.