She was "a woman of uncertain age.

There are mountainous, arduous days, up which one takes an infinite time to climb, and downward-sloping days which one can descend at full tilt, singing as one goes.

An hour is not merely an hour, it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

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.

A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!