Love is a punishment. We are punished for not having been strong enough to remain alone.

One reads thousands of books, of poets, modern and ancient, as one meets thousands of people. What remains of it all is hard to tell.

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.

No one understands eternity. One simply recognizes its existence.

I knew that good like bad becomes a routine, that the temporary tends to endure, that what is external permeates to the inside, and that the mask, given time, comes to be the face itself.

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

He had reached that moment in life, different for each one of us, when a man abandonds himself to his demon or to his genius, following a mysterious law which bids him either to destroy or outdo himself.