It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.

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

The only paradise is paradise lost.

And indeed when we are no longer in love with women whom we meet after many years, is there not the abyss of death between them and ourselves, just as much as if they were no longer of this world, since the fact that we are no longer in love makes the people that they were or the person that we were then as good as dead?

We feel in one world, we think and name in another. Between the two we can set up a system of references, but we cannot fill in the gap.

At that time, he was satisfying a sensual curiosity by experiencing the pleasures of people who live for love. He had believed he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows; how small a thing her charm was for him now compared with the astounding terror that extended out from it like a murky halo, the immense anguish of not knowing at every moment what she had been doing, of not possessing her everywhere and always!

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail... failure is his world and the shrink from it desertion