A woman who thinks she is intelligent demands the same rights as man. An intelligent woman gives up.

I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.

The day after that wedding night I found that a distance of a thousand miles, abyss and discovery and irremediable metamorphosis, separated me from the day before.

- and how time flies! What, has it already been twenty years, already forty years that we are together? Why, how terrible! We haven't yet said all we wanted to say to each other... May we have a little respite, or else may we be allowed to begin all over again!

I am going away with him to an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, and where I shall be born again with a new face and an untried heart.

There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.

I did not look for her, because I was afraid of dispelling the mystery we attach to people whom we know only casually.