"I am sick of the governessy attitude of our age, which is coming to be more genuinely presumptuous, nosier and more b…"

"Only in a house where one has learnt to be lonely does one have this solicitude for things. One's relation to them, t…"

"[T]here is a flaw in civilization from the instant it has to admit fear."

"[U]ntruths are thieves, robbing us of a birthright."

"Cicero, in invoking the law of heaven, invoked what was by nature of heaven: law — inviolable principle, better than …"

"It is thought that women inspire by their beauty; more often they do so by their longings."

"Experience isn't interesting until it begins to repeat itself — in fact, till it does that, it hardly is experience."

"Intimacies between women go backwards, beginning in revelations and ending up in small talk without loss of esteem."

"Fate is not an eagle, it creeps like a rat."

"This is the worst of love, this unmeant mystification — someone smiling and going out without saying where, or a lett…"