I talk too much because I have been made so miserable by what you are keeping hushed.
The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.
New York is the meeting place of the peoples, the only city where you can hardly find a typical American.
I like my human experience served up with a little silence and restraint. Silence makes experience go further and, when it does die, gives it that dignity common to a thing one had touched and not ravished.
Destiny and history are untidy.
Man is the only thing that has no further use after something goes amiss.
The night is a skin pulled over the head of day that the day may be in torment.
A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself – and what is a man’s shadow but his upright astonishment?
I am not a critic; to me criticism is so often nothing more than the eye garrulously denouncing the shape of the peephole that gives access to hidden treasure.
Why is it that whenever I hear music I think I’m a bride?
And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?
An image is a stop the mind makes between uncertainties.
After all, it is not where one washes one’s neck that counts but where one moistens one’s throat.
Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?
The priceless galaxy of misinformation called the mind.
Well, isn’t Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else – and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?
I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet under a cow pat.
We are but skin about a wind, with muscles clenched against mortality.
A man’s sorrow runs uphill; true it is difficult for him to bear, but it is also difficult for him to keep.
Dreams have only the pigmentation of fact.