Often it is just lack of imagination that keeps a man from suffering very much.

Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves, and not anything else, and by the immobility of our conceptions of them.

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one's eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one s mistress.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

Our shadows, now parallel, now close together and joined, traced an exquisite pattern at our feet.

We love only what we do not wholly possess.

But when one believes in the reality of things, making them visible by artificial means is not quite the same as feeling that they are close at hand.