I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.
My life which I dream will be so beautiful, so poetic, so vast, so filled with love will turn out to be like everybody else’s – monotonous, sensible, stupid.
Thought is the greatest of pleasures – pleasure itself is only imagination – have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?
I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.
Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.
Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.
How we keep these dead souls in our hearts. Each one of us carries within himself his necropolis.
There are some men whose only mission among others is to act as intermediaries; one crosses them like bridges and keeps going.
Emma was no asleep, she was pretending to be asleep; and, while he was dozing off at her side, she lay awake, dreaming other dreams.
After the pain of this disappointment her heart once more stood empty, and the succession of identical days began again.
And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate.
A good sentence in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable, as rhythmic, as sonorous.
To be simple is no small matter.
I have no use for the kind of God who goes walking in his garden with a stick, sends his friends to live in the bellies of whales, gives up the ghost with a groan and then comes back to life three days later!
L’Ide e seule est e ternelle et ne cessaire. The idea alone is eternal and necessary.