In the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

A worker may be the hammer's master, but the hammer still prevails. A tool knows exactly how it is meant to be handled, while the user of the tool can only have an approximate idea.

She regarded books as the emblems of secret brotherhood. A man with this sort of library couldn't possibly hurt her.

Necessity, weight, and value are three concepts inextricably bound: only necessity is heavy, and only what is heavy has value.

And I ran after that voice through the streets so as not to lose sight of the splendid wreath of bodies gliding over the city, and I realized with anguish in my heart that they were flying like birds and I was falling like a stone, that they had wings and I would never have any.

Jealousy has the amazing power to illuminate a single person in an intense beam of light, keeping the multitude of others in total darkness.