Are not the thoughts of the dying often turned towards the practical, painful, obscure, visceral aspect, towards the "seamy side" of death which is, as it happens, the side that death actually presents to them and forces them to feel, and which far more closely resembles a crushing burden, a difficulty in breathing, a destroying thirst, than the abstract idea to which we are accustomed to give the name of Death?

Time passes, and little by little everything that we have spoken in falsehood becomes true.

There was nothing abnormal about it when homosexuality was the norm.

Perhaps the pleasure one feels in writing is not the infallible test of the literary value of a page; perhaps it is only a secondary state which is often superadded, but the want of which can have no prejudicial effect on it. Perhaps some of the greatest masterpieces were written while yawning.

Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

The highest praise of God consists in the denial of him by the atheist who finds creation so perfect that it can dispense with a creator.