I have a theory of my own about what the art of the novel is, and how it came into being....It happens because the storyteller's own experience...has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.

No penance can your hard heart find save such as you long since have taught me to endure

A night of endless dreams, inconsequent and wild, is this my life; none more worth telling than the rest.

Beauty without colour seems somehow to belong to another world.

Stepmothers in books usually behave very spitefully towards the children entrusted to them. But he was now learning by his own experience that in real life this does not always happen.

It is in general the unexplored that attracts us.

Old age is a disease from which there is no recovery but the old nun's recent attack had certainly been brought on chiefly by the fatigue of so much travelling.