If you have but one friend, make sure you choose her well.
Personally I think that grammar is a way to attain beauty.
Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside she is covered in quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary – and terrible elegant.
Do you know that it is in your company that I have had my finest thoughts?
The real ordeal is not leaving those you love but learning to live without those who don’t love you.
I know that they’re all unhappy because nobody loves the right person the way they should and because they don’t understand that it’s really their own self that they’re mad at.
To tell a group of adolescents who already know how to speak and write that that is the purpose of grammar is like telling someone that they need to read a history of toilets through the ages in order to pee and poop.
Poverty is a reaper: it harvests everything inside us that might have made us capable of social intercourse with others, and leaves us empty, purged of feeling, so that we may endure all the darkness of the present day.
What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.
Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that inspire nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?
Wine is the refined jewel that only a grown woman will prefer to the sparkling trinkets adored by little girls.
There’s so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature.
If there is one thing I detest, it’s when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed.
So much for the movement of the world! It could have been perfection and it was a disaster. It should be experienced in reality and it is pleasure by proxy, like always.
The French are often, when it comes to wine, so formal that they border on the ridiculous.
This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence.
It would never have crossed her mind spontaneously that somebody might actually need silence. That silence helps you to go inward, that anyone who is interested in something more than just life outside actually needs silence.
This is the end of an epic tale, the story of my coming of age, which, like in the novels of the same description, went from wonder to ambition, from ambition to disillusion, and from disillusion to cynicism.
It is always reassuring to be disabused of one’s own paranoia.
I also wonder fearfully what will happen when the only friend I have ever had, the only one who knows everything without ever having to ask, leaves behind her this woman whom no one knows, enshrouding her in oblivion.