We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon’s events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come.
The best way to fill time is to waste it.
That she had so completely recovered her sanity was a source of sadness to her. One should never be cured of one’s passion.
Very early in my life it was too late.
In a certain state of mind, all trace of feeling is banished. Whenever I remain silent in a certain way, I don’t love you, have you noticed that?
Oh, how good it is to be with someone, sometimes.
In love there are no vacations. No such thing. Love has to be lived fully with its boredom and all that.
It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.
Suddenly, all at once, she knows, knows that he doesn’t understand her, that he never will, that he lacks the power to understand such perverseness. And that he can never move fast enough to catch her.
I know it’s not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don’t know where. I only know it isn’t where women think.
You are what you are and that fascinates me.
He says he’s lonely, horribly lonely because of this love he feels for her. She says she’s lonely too. She doesn’t say why.
Our mothers always remain the strangest, craziest people we’ve ever met.
Paradoxically, the freedom of Paris is associated with a persistent belief that nothing ever changes. Paris, they say, is the city that changes least. After an absence of twenty or thirty years, one still recognizes it.
What stops you killing yourself when you’re intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you’re dead you won’t be able to drink any more.
The solitude of writing is a solitude without which writing could not be produced, or would crumble, drained bloodless by the search for something else to write.
You alone became the outer surface of my life, the side I never see, and you will be that, the unknown part of me, until I die.
Get rid of things or you’ll spend your whole life tidying up.
Men like women who write. Even though they don’t say so. A writer is a foreign country.
I’ve known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.