“The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.”

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all it’s knowledge and questions.

we interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

Reading is more important than writing.

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Reading is like thinking, like praying, like talking to a friend, like expressing your ideas, like listening to other people’s ideas, like listening to music, like looking at the view, like taking a walk on the beach.

We all have to die a bit every now and then and usually it’s so gradual that we end up more alive than ever. Infinitely old and infinitely alive.

Nothing is ever behind us.

When you die of sorrow it’s as if you’ve broken all the bones in your body, bruised yourself all over, cracked your skull. That’s sorrow.

You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats

Bright colours in the west, giant butterflies dancing as night crept like a cripple toward the east.

I’m an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

Fear of the future is worse than one’s present fortune.

Good fortune is as light as a feather, but nobody knows how to pick it up. Misfortune is as heavy as earth, but nobody knows how to stay out of it’s way.

War will of itself discover and lay open the hidden and rankling wounds of the victorious party.

Aggressive Christianity is the world’s greatest need.

The task of history is to hold out for reprobation every evil word and deed, and to hold out for praise every great and noble word and deed.

When a building is about to fall down, all the mice desert it.

Adversity deprives us of our judgment.

Miseram pacem vel bello bene mutari. Even war is preferable to a shameful peace.