It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

Doesn't one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees? Aren't they one's past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees ... one's happiness, one's reality?

Lord, how tired one gets of one's own writing.

In fact, though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.

The best letters of our time are precisely those that can never be published.

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame.