“The face of the night will be an old wound that reopens each evening, impassive and living. The distant silence will ache like a soul, mute, in the dark. We’ll speak to the night as it’s whispering softly.”

A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.

Great lovers will always be unhappy, because, for them, love is of supreme importance. Consequently they demand of their beloved the same intensity of thought as they have for her, otherwise they feel betrayed.

Love has the faculty of making two lovers seem naked, not in each other’s sight, but in their own.

The only way to escape the abyss is to look at it, gauge it, sound it out and descend into it.

Death is repose, but the thought of death disturbs all repose.

You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.

Hate is always a clash between our spirit and someone else’s body.

The real affliction of old age is remorse.

A corpse is what’s left after waking too often.

The cadence of suffering has begun. Every evening at dusk, my heart constricts until night has come.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies. The fearful thing about it is that, not knowing what truth may be, we can still recognize lies.

A love thought: I love you so much that I could wish I had been born your brother, or had brought you into the world myself.

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

She says nothing at all but simply stares upward into the dark sky and watches, with sad eyes, the slow dance of the infinite stars.

His grief he will not forget; but it will not darken his heart, it will teach him wisdom.

But in the end it’s only a passing thing, this shadow; even darkness must pass.

I want the deepest, darkest, sickest parts of you that you are afraid to share with anyone because I love you that much.

The baby bat Screamed out in fright, turn on the dark, I’m afraid of the light.

I remember watching the mascara tears flood the ivories and I thought, It’s OK to be sad. I’ve been trained to love my darkness.

Success always calls for greater generosity—though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed.

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.