Perfume is that last and best reserve of the past, the one which when all out tears have run dry, can make us cry again!

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

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

So we don't believe that life is beautiful because we don't recall it but if we get a whiff of a long-forgotten smell we are suddenly intoxicated and similarly we think we no longer love the dead because we don't remember them but if by chance we come across an old glove we burst into tears.

Friendship is in the end no more than: " . . . a lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone."

I drank a second mouthful in which I find nothing more than in the first, then a third which gives me rather less than the second. It is time to stop; the potion is losing its magic.

Having a body is in itself the greatest threat to the mind... The body encloses the mind in a fortress; before long the mind is besieged on all sides, and in the end the mind has to give itself up.