Disgust at having to talk about oneself is what distinguishes novelistic talent from lyric talent.

When graves are covered with stones, the dead can no longer get out. But the dead can't go out anyway! What difference does it make whether they're covered with soil or stones?

Yes, it was too late, and Sabina knew she would leave Paris, move on, and on again, because were she to die here they would cover her up with a stone, and in the mind of a woman for whom no place is home the thought of an end to all flight is unbearable.

Art arises from sources other than logic." (p.32)

What I love in a woman is not what she is in and for herself, but the side of herself she turns towards me, what she is for me. I love her as character in our common love story. what wuld Hamlet be without the castle at Elsinore, without Ophelia, without all the concrete situations he goes through, what would he be without the text of his part? What would be left but an empty, dumb, illusory essence?

loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

I have to lie, if I don't want to take madmen seriously and become a madman myself