If only I could value myself more! Alas! It is impossible.

L'amour commence, on voudrait rester pour celle qu'on aime l'inconnu qu'elle peut aimer mais on a besoin d'elle, on a besoin de toucher moins son corps que son attention, son coeur.

Love? I make it often, but I never talk about it.

Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.

The truth is that as we grow older we kill all those who love us by the cares we give them, by the anxious tenderness we inspire in them and constantly arouse.

There is an inanimate object which has a capacity to exasperate which no human being will ever attain: a piano.

In my most desperate moments, I have never conceived of anything more horrible than a law office.

My only consolation when I am really sad is to love and to be loved.

He had so long since ceased to direct his life toward any ideal goal, and had confined himself to the pursuit of quotidian satisfactions, that he had come to believe, though without ever formally stating his belief even to himself that he would remain all his life in that condition, which only death could alter.