“When from a long distant past nothing subsists after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain.”

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

Love is space and time measured by the heart.

The artist who gives up an hour of work for an hour of conversation with a friend knows that he is sacrificing a reality for something that does not exist.

A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.

It comes so soon, the moment when there is nothing left to wait for.

The courage of one’s opinions is always a form of calculating cowardice in the eyes of the other side.

My destination is no longer a place, rather a new way of seeing.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Love ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

Like many intellectuals, he was incapable of saying a simple thing in a simple way.

Happiness serves hardly any other purpose than to make unhappiness possible.

It is not because other people are dead that our affection for them grows faint, it is because we ourselves are dying.

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

To write that essential book, a great writer does not need to invent it but merely to translate it, since it already exists in each one of us. The duty and task of a writer are those of translator.

Only by art can we get outside ourselves, instead of seeing only one world, our own, we see it under multiple forms.

I like you here, between commas, where the only thing you can break now, is my lines.

You love so perfectly, as if you have never been told a heart can be broken.

The cholera had broken out at the post, and five or six men were dying daily.

There is one thing I would break up over, and that is if she caught me with another woman. I won’t stand for that.

When I told you that I hadn’t been broken before; it wasn’t a fucking challenge.

Some nights, alone, he thinks of her, and some nights, alone, she thinks of him. Some night these thoughts, separated by miles and time zones, occur at the same objective moment, and Ray and Mirabelle are connected without ever knowing it.

I was fifteen years old when I understood how it is that things break down: people can’t imagine someone else’s point of view.

We were electric together, you and me; we turned hurting each other into a goddamned symphony.