The heart of another is a dark forest, always, no matter how close it has been to one's own.

Setting ... is accident. Either a building is part of a place, or it is not. Once that kinship is there, time will only make it stronger.

Paris is a hard place to leave, even when it rains incessantly and one coughs continually from the dampness.

Every artist makes herself born. You must bring the artist into the world yourself.

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

It does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of.

In other searchings it might be the object of the quest that brought satisfaction, or it might be something incidental that one got on the way; but in religion, desire was fulfilment, it was the seeking itself that rewarded.