It is desire that engenders belief and if we fail as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end only with our own life.

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

Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

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.

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

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.