The ideal of happiness has always taken material form in the house, whether cottage or castle; it stands for permanence and separation from the world.

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.

It is in great part the anxiety of being a woman that devastates the feminine body.

And without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one's liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.

Anyway I know only too well that all life is nothing but a brief reprieve from death.

To be oneself, simply oneself, is so amazing and utterly unique an experience that it's hard to convince oneself so singular a thing happens to everybody.

The day had been spent in the expectation of these hours, and now they were crumbling away, becoming, in their turn, another period of expectancy...It was a journey without end, leading to an indefinite future, eternally shifting just as she was reaching the present.