Dreams, memories, the sacred--they are all alike in that they are beyond our grasp. Once we are even marginally separated from what we can touch, the object is sanctified; it acquires the beauty of the unattainable, the quality of the miraculous. Everything, really, has this quality of sacredness, but we can desecrate it at a touch. How strange man is! His touch defiles and yet he contains the source of miracles.

We live in an age in which there is no heroic death.

In the pale light of daybreak the gravestones looked like so many white sails of boats anchored in a busy harbor. They were sails that would never again be filled with wind, sails that, too long unused and heavily drooping, had been turned into stone just as they were. The boats' anchors had been thrust so deeply into the dark earth that they could never again be raised.

Nobody even imagines how well one can lie about the state of one’s own heart.

...of all the kinds of decay in this world, decadent purity is the most malignant.

There isn't any fear in existence itself, or any uncertainty, but living creates it.

It is a rather risky matter to discuss a happiness that has no need of words.