Until you have wasted time in a city, you cannot pretend to know it well.

What is real is beyond all reach.

Death is losing its terror. It is the emergency exit for a world that is becoming more frightening death ever was.

Sitting in the lap of the model you intend to paint never seemed to me to be the ideal location.

But nowadays my heart is empty and the boxwood has lost its magic scent; yes, absolutely and entirely. The creature that I was no longer exists. When I speak to her she does not understand me; I think of her, already, as of some one I have known but who no longer has any connection with myself.

I would like to know if the fact of a novel is consistent with the state of grace.

Paris … is loath to surrender itself to people who are in a hurry; it belongs to the dreamers.…

...because one of the privileges of Paris, one of its rarest graces, bestowed only on those who know how to WASTE TIME there, is suddenly to show itself in unusual guises...