For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.
If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Take off all your envies, jealousies, unforgiveness, selfishness and fears.
Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.
The slowness of time, for a man who knows nothing will happen, is brutal.
In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.
Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven.
When a woman marries she belongs to another man; and when she belongs to another man there is nothing more you can say to her.
Maybe it’s better like this, better that everything should go up in a blaze of dry grass and that people should begin again.
The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
A consoling thought: what matters is not what we do, but the spirit in which we do it. Others suffer too; so much so that there is nothing in the world but suffering; the problem is simply to keep a clear conscience.
Why so much innuendo, draped like ivy to hide a cesspool, when everyone knew the cesspool was there?
People who don’t know any better will always be in the dark because the power lies in the hands of men who take good care that ordinary folk don’t understand, in the hands, that is, of the government, of the clerical party, of the capitalists.
But the real, tremendous truth is this: suffering serves no purpose whatever.
A man succeeds in completing a work only when his qualities transcend that work.
But all years are stupid. It’s only when they’re over that they become interesting.
Remember, writing poetry is like making love: one will never know whether one’s own pleasure is shared.
Waiting is still an occupation. It is having nothing to wait for that is terrible.
There is only one pleasure-that of being alive. All the rest is misery.
You’ve got to understand life, understand it when you’re young.
There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.
You cannot insult a man more atrociously than by refusing to believe he is suffering .