The Cicada sing an endless song in the long grass, smells run along the earth and falling stars run over the sky, like tears over a cheek. You are the privileged person to whom everything is taken. The Kings of Tarshish shall bring gifts.
Of all the idiots I have met in my life, and the Lord knows they have not been few or little, I think that I have been the biggest.
You must not think that I feel, in spite of it having ended in such defeat, that my “life has been wasted” here, or that I would exchange it with that of anyone I know.
One does not travel by plane. One is merely sent, like a parcel.
I think it will be truly glorious when women become real people and have the whole world open to them.
A great artist is never poor.
You know you are truly alive when you’re living among lions.
All sorrows can be borne if you can put them into a story.
We must leave our mark on life while we have it in our power.
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me a chance to do my best.
I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.
I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.
It is impossible that a town will not play a part in your life, it does not even make much difference whether you have more good or bad things to say of it, it draws your mind to it, by a mental law of gravitation.
No domestic animal can be as still as a wild animal. The civilized people have lost the aptitude of stillness, and must take lessons in silence from the wild before they are accepted by it.
The present is always unsettled, no one has had time to contemplate it in tranquillity. I was a painter before I was a writer and a painter never wants the subject right under his nose; he wants to stand back and study a landscape with half-closed eyes.
In those days I had various strong inclinations, for wine, gambling and cockfighting, and the society of gypsies, together with a passion for theological discussion which I had inherited from my father himself-all of which my father thought I had better rid myself of before I married.
I felt that Paris was illuminated by a splendor possessed by no other places.
It is a good thing to be a great sinner. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the Cross for the sake of our petty lies and our paltry whorings.
The lime trees were in bloom. But in the early morning only a faint fragrance drifted through the garden, an airy message, an aromatic echo of the dreams during the short summer night.
There are things which cannot be carried through even with the good will of everybody concerned.