Behind it was that vast suspension bridge which always troubles me because it reminds me that in this mechanized age I am as little able to understand my environment as any primitive woman who thinks that a waterfall is inhabited by a spirit, and indeed less so, for her opinion might from a poetical point of view be correct.

If the poor ever feel poor as the rich do, we will have a most bloody revolution.

Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.

There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

All good biography, as all good fiction, comes down to the study of original sin, of our inherent disposition to choose death when we ought to choose life.

There are acacias, a graceful species amusingly devitalized by sentimentality, this kind drooping its leaves with the grace of a young widow bowed in controllable grief, this one obscuring them with a smooth silver as of placid tears. They please, like the minor French novelists of the eighteenth century, by suggesting a universe in which nothing cuts deep.