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

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

Women will always put persons above ideas ... and so they'll always be defeated. Persons die, and ideas rule the world.

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed.

to grow old is to have taken away, one by one, all gifts of life, the food and wine, the music and the company. ... the gods unloose, one by one, the mortal fingers that cling to the edge of the table.