Books are the mirrors of the soul.
When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?
No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence.
Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.
Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
I am rooted, but I flow.
I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.
Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
What does the brain matter compared with the heart?
Arrange whatever pieces come your way.
He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.
Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched – love for instance – we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.
The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.
I want someone to sit beside after the day’s pursuit and all its anguish, after its listening, and its waitings, and its suspicions. After quarrelling and reconciliation I need privacy – to be alone with you, to set this hubbub in order. For I am as neat as a cat in my habits.
She belonged to a different age, but being so entire, so complete, would always stand up on the horizon, stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, this interminable – this interminable life.