I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery.

What you love too violently finishes by killing you.

Nevertheless man has found love, which is not a bad reply to that sly Deity, and he has adorned it with so much poetry that woman often forgets the sensual part of it. Those among us who are unable to deceive themselves have invented vice and refined debauchery, which is another way of laughing at God and paying homage, immodest homage, to beauty.

...perhaps, also this short embrace may infuse in their veins a little of this thrill which they would not have known without it, and will give to those two dead souls, brought to life in a second, the rapid and divine sensation of this intoxication, of this madness which gives to lovers more happiness in an instant than other men can gather during a whole lifetime.

Is it not rather the touch of Love, of Love the Mysterious, who seeks constantly to unite two beings, who tries his strength the instant he has put a man and a woman face to face?

Yes, this is the only good thing in life: love! To hold a woman you love in your arms! That is the ultimate in human happiness.

But he asked himself now if he would not be disobeying God. And does not God permit love, since He surrounds it with such visible splendor?

Yet her heart did not thirst for emotions like the hearts of sentimental women; she was not searching for a man's unique love nor for the gratification of a passion. All she required was the admiration of every man she met, acknowledgment of capitulation, the homage of universal tenderness.

Savo širdyje ji pyko ant Žiuljeno, kad jis to nesupranta, kad visai neturi to subtilaus drovumo, to instinktyvaus delikatumo; ir ji pajuto tarp savęs ir jo tarsi uždangą, tarsi kažkokią kliūtį, pirmą kartą pastebėjusi, kad du žmonės niekada negali prasiskverbti iki vienas kito sielos, iki minčių gelmių, kad jie gali eiti šalia vienas kito, kartais apsikabinę, bet ne susilieję, ir kad dvasinė mūsų esmė visą gyvenimą klaidžioja vieniša.