“Consolation for those moments when you can’t tell whether you’re the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

Friendships, even the best of them, are frail things. One drifts apart.

I need silence, and to be alone and to go out, and to save one hour to consider what has happened to my world, what death has done to my world.

I like to have space to spread my mind out in.

She dares me to pour myself out like a living waterfall. She dares me to enter the soul that is more than my own; she extinguishes fear in mere seconds. She lets light come through.

The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you’ve struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.

I like people to be unhappy because I like them to have souls.

I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.

The eyes of others our prisons; their thoughts our cages.

The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.

Just in case you ever foolishly forget; I’m never not thinking of you.

I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.

Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title.

Anything may happen when womanhood has ceased to be a protected occupation.

I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.

A love of nature is a consolation against failure.

Next to the consolations of divine grace, it is the most sovereign balm to the miseries of life, both in him who is the object of it, and in him who exercises it.

The Bahá´í Faith is consolation for humanity.

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation. For while the movements of people are unpredictable, the movement of time is predictable.

A world in which time is absolute is a world of consolation.

I write what I call ‘novels of consolation’ for people who are bright and sophisticated.

None better suited to the cure of our temporal ills than a friend to whom we may turn for consolation in time of trouble, and with whom we may share happiness in time of joy.