Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.

Do not wait for life. Do not long for it. Be aware, always and at every moment, that the miracle is in the here and now.

But sometimes illumination comes to our rescue at the very moment when all seems lost; we have knocked at every door and they open on nothing until, at last, we stumble unconsciously against the only one through which we can enter the kingdom we have sought in vain a hundred years - and it opens.

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

Love...., ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

... we made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.

We were resigned to suffering, thinking that we loved outside ourselves, and we perceive that our love is a function of our sorrow, that our love perhaps is our sorrow.