Stupidity lies in wanting to draw conclusions.
But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted.
Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence.
It is an excellent habit to look at things as so many symbols.
Everything is there: the love of Art.
The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is something else entirely and of an inferior order.
And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is buring?
She did not believe that things could remain the same in different places, and since the portion of her life that lay behind her had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.
I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.
Iced champagne was served, and the feel of the cold wine in her mouth gave Emma a shiver that ran over her from head to toe.
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.