The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
I love the autumn – that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.
While there’s life there’s hope.
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
But she – her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.
Remembering the ball became for Emma a daily occupation. Every time Wednesday came round, she told herself when she woke up: ‘Ah! One week ago... two weeks ago... three weeks ago, I was there!’ And, little by little, in her memory, the faces all blurred together; she forgot the tunes of the quadrilles; no longer could she so clearly picture the liveries and the rooms; some details disappeared, but the yearning remained.
I’m the sort of man who’s doomed to be a failure and I’ll go to my grave without ever knowing whether I was real gold or just tinsel!
My soul has been haunted by something like those forgotten melodies that come back to us at twilight, during those slow hours in which memory, like a ghost among ruins, stalks our thoughts.
Contradiction is what keeps sanity in place.
Emma repeated to herself, “Good Heavens! Why did I marry?
His heart was flooded with immense love, and as he gazed on her he could feel his mind growing numb.
One thinks of nothing,’ he continued; ’the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.
Ne lisez pas comme les enfants lisent, pour vous amuser, ni comme les ambitieux lisent, pour vous instruire. Non. Lisez pour vivre.
But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated.
I envision a style: a style that would be beautiful, that someone will invent some day, ten years or ten centuries from now, one that would be rhythmic as verse, precise as the language of the sciences, undulant, deep-voiced as a cello, tipped with flame: a style that would pierce your idea like a dagger, and on which your thought would sail easily ahead over a smooth surface, like a skiff before a good tail wind.