In reality, every reader is, while reading, the reader of his own self.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

She was "a woman of uncertain age.

A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.

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

I was left alone there in the company of the orchids, roses and violets, which, like people waiting beside you who do not know you, preserved a silence which their individuality as living things made all the more striking, and warmed themselves in the heat of a glowing coal fire.

But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.