Numbers constitute the only universal language.

He read it for the same reason an animal tears at a wounded foot: to hurt the pain.

You once said to me that I talk like a man in a book. I not only talk, but think and feel like one. I have spent my life in books; literature has deeply dyed my brain its own colour. This literary colouring is a protective one--like the brown of the rabbit or the checks of the quail--making it impossible for me to tell where literature ends and I begin.

It's solitary drinking that makes drunkards.

He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.

Man spends a great deal of time making order out of chaos, yet insists that the emotions be disordered. I order my emotions: I am insane.

Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.