Our best yesterdays are now foul piles of crumpled names.

By God, I could make myself bring her that economically halved grapefruit, that sugarless breakfast.

Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle.

I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly.

Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.

I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.

That swimming, sloping, elusive something about the dark-bluish tint of the iris which seemed still to retain the shadows it had absorbed of ancient, fabulous forests where there were more birds than tigers and more fruit than thorns, and where, in some dappled depth, man's mind had been born.