The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions.

Any marriage worth the name is no better than a series of beginnings - many of them abortive.

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening) or in a future which we either long for or dread. . . . There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute, here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is-a miracle and unrepeatable.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

The past is able to close round certain moments, as if they were seeds, and deliver them again fresh and living in the present.