It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Courage is morally neutral.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Decline of the letter, the rise of the notebook! One doesn't write to others any more; one writes to oneself.

It's not that you make up your ideas to justify your temperament but that it's the temperament first.

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

taste governs every free - as opposed to rote - human response. Nothing is more decisive. There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion - and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.