“It had to happen to you, to concentrate your whole life on one point, and then discover that you can do anything except live at that point.”

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.

Nowadays, suicide is just a way of disappearing. It is carried out timidly, quietly, and falls flat. It is no longer an action, only a submission.

What world lies beyond that stormy sea I do not know, but every ocean has a distant shore, and I shall reach it.

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when the masks are dropped.