“Against the beautiful and the clever and the successful, one can wage a pitiless war, but not against the unattractive: then the millstone weighs on the breast.”

We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can love even with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other.

It’s a good world if you don’t weaken.

As long as one suffers one lives.

There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.

All good novelists have bad memories.

When we are not sure, we are alive.

Politics, war, marriage, crime, adultery. Everything that exists in the world has something to do with money.

Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long.

I say that home is where there is a chair and a glass.

You cannot conceive, nor can I, of the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.

There is a point of no return, unremarked at the time, in most lives.

Morality comes with the sad wisdom of age, when the sense of curiosity has withered.

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

One can’t love humanity. One can only love people.

Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

We should not call a city happy because it attracts masses of citizens from everywhere; a fortunate city is one in which the race of the original inhabitants is best preserved.

A good listener is very nearly as attractive as a good talker. You cannot have a beautiful mind if you do not know how to listen.

Classic romantic love is an emotional attraction between two individuals in which they may share a heightened awareness of mutual adoration.

When the shoe fits, the foot is forgotten. When the belt fits, the belly is forgotten. When the heart is right, “for” and “against” are forgotten. No drives, no compulsions, no needs, no attractions: Then your affairs are under control. You are a free man.

It is inevitable when one has a great need of something one finds it. What you need you attract like a lover.

You attract what you need like a lover.

It’s more important to be healthy and of good spirit than it is to be thin, just as it’s more important to be an attractive woman than a fashionable one.

I’ve always been attracted to guys with big brains.