What is so nice & so unexpected about life is the way it improves as it goes along. I think you should impress this fact on your children because I think young people have an awful feeling that life is slipping past them & they must do something - catch something - they don't quite know what, whereas they've only got to wait & it all comes.

always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair they loved or they loathed, they lived in a world of superlatives

Life itself, she thought, as she went upstairs to dress for dinner, was stranger than dreams and far, far more disordered.

When the loo paper gets thicker and the writing paper thinner, it's always a bad sign, at home.

Do you always laugh when you make love?' said Fabrice. I hadn't thought about it, but I suppose I do. I generally laugh when I'm happy and cry when I'm not. Do you find it odd?

Sisters are a shield against life's cruel adversity.

An aristocracy in a republic is like a chicken whose head has been cut off: it may run about in a lively way, but in fact it is dead.