You are adorable, mademoiselle. I study your feet with the microscope and your soul with the telescope.

At the moment when her eyes closed, when all feeling vanished in her, she thought that she felt a touch of fire imprinted on her lips, a kiss more burning than the red-hot iron of the executioner.

I will be Chateaubriand or nothing.

Women play with their beauty as children do with their knives. They wound themselves with it.

The repose of darkness is deeper on the water than on the land.

There are, as we know, powerful and illustrious atheists. At bottom, led back to the truth by their very force, they are not absolutely sure that they are atheists; it is with them only a question of definition, and in any case, if they do not believe in God, being great minds, they prove God.

If I have not been exposed and am not in any danger of pursuit. But I have been exposed, I am pursued - by myself! That is a pursuer that does not readily let go.