“There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.”

From someone who doesn’t want to share your destiny, you should neither accept a cigarette.

We like to have work to do, so as to have the right to rest.

Don’t mix wine and women.

You don’t remember days, you remember moments.

Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in this world.

All our “most sacred affections ” are merely prosaic habit.

Perfect behaviour is born of complete indifference.

Lessons are not given, they are taken.

The whole problem of life, then, is this: how to break out of one’s own loneliness, how to communicate with others.

No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.

Human imagination is immensely poorer than reality.

The only reason why we are always thinking of our own ego is that we have to live with it more continuously than with anyone else’s.

For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.

The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.

The world, the future, is now within you as your past, as experience, skill in technique, and the rich, everlasting mystery is found to be childish you that, at the time, you made no effort to possess.

We must never say, even in fun, that we are disheartened, because someone might take us at our word.

You never get it back, but to this day I don’t regret splitting up.

To the heart that knows contentment, every day is Thanksgiving.

Like all my family and class, I considered it a sign of weakness to show affection; to have been caught kissing my mother would have been a disgrace, and to have shown affection for my father would have been a disaster.

If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

I try to swim every damn day I can, and I’ve learned to scuba dive and snorkel.

Someone once told me the definition of hell; on your last day on earth, the person you could have become will meet the person you became.

We are the natural nurturers of the Earth Mother.

I’ve got nothing against daylight. I don’t live totally nocturnally. Only when I feel like it. Which is most of the time.