“Her eyes, which refused to meet mine, had the defensive coldness of those who are determined to lose hope.”

Guilt keeps people imprisoned in themselves.

Writing is like getting married. One should never commit oneself until one is amazed at one’s luck.

Art and psychoanalisis give shape and meaning to life and that’s why we adore them. However, life as it is lived has no shape nor meaning, and that’s what I am experiencing right now.

But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

We defend ourselves with descriptions and tame the world by generalizing.

Reading and writing and the preservation of language and its forms and the kind of eloquence and the kind of beauty which the language is capable of is terribly important to the human beings because this is connected to thought.

Every persisting marriage is based on fear’, said Peregrine. ‘Fear is fundamental, you dig down in human nature and what’s at the bottom? Mean spiteful cruel self-regarding fear, whether it makes you to put the foot in it or whether it makes you to cower.

Only take someone’s hand in a certain way, even look into their eyes in a certain way, and the world is changed forever.

Only the very greatest art invigorates without consoling.

Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is.

This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart.

I felt a deep grief that crouched and stayed still as if it was afraid to move.

What a test that is: more than devotion, admiration, passion. If you long and long for someone’s company you love them.

Love doesn’t think like that. All right, it’s blind as a bat- Bats have radar. Yours doesnt seem to be working.

What an extraordinary satisfaction there is in cleaning things! (Does the satisfaction depend on ownership? I suspect so.

The talk of lovers who have just declared their love is one of life’s most sweet delights. Each vies with the other in humility, in amazement at being so valued. The past is searched for the first signs and each one is in haste to declare all that he is so that no part of his being escapes the hallowing touch.

Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.

I don’t give up because I don’t give up. I don’t believe in it.

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

No hours, nor amount of labor, nor amount of money would deter me from giving the best that there was in me.

Characters make their own plot. The dimensions of the characters determine the action of the novel.

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Nothing is impossible to a determined woman.