We say: mad with joy. We should say: wise with grief.

This city belongs to ghosts, to murderers, to sleepwalkers. Where are you, in what bed, in what dream?

But happiness is brittle, and if men and circumstances don't destroy it, it is threatened by ghosts.

nothing is slower than the true birth of a man

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them.

The landscape of my days appears to be composed, like mountainous regions, of varied materials heaped up pell-mell. There I see my nature, itself composite, made up of equal parts of instinct and training. Here and there protrude the granite peaks of the inevitable, but all about is rubble from the landslips of chance.

All happiness is a work of art: the smallest error falsifies it, the slightest hesitation alters it, the least heaviness spoils it, the slightest stupidity brutalizes it.