Of them all, it was the true love. Of them all, it was the best. That other sumptuous love which made one drunk, which one longed for, envied, believed in, that was not life. It...

Women fall in love when they get to know you. Men are just the opposite. When they finally know you they’re ready to leave

One should not believe too strongly in a life which can easily vanish.

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to...

I’m tired of my life, my clothes, the things I say. I’m hacking away at the surface, as at some kind of gray ice, trying to break through to what is underneath or I am...

They lay silently. She was staring at something across the room. She was making him feel uncomfortable. ‘It wouldn’t work. It’s the attraction of opposites,’ he said.We’re not opposites.’I don’t mean just you and me....

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires.

Art, in a sense, is life brought to a standstill, rescued from time. The secret of making it is simple: discard everything that is good enough.

He liked to read with the silence and the golden color of the whiskey as his companions. He liked food, people, talk, but reading was an inexhaustible pleasure. What the joys of music were to...

You must go further than I did,” Nedra said. “You know that.””Further?””With your life. You must become free.”She did not explain it; she could not. It was not a matter of living alone, though in...

…alone in this city, alone on this sea. The days were strewn about him, he was a drunkard of days. He had achieved nothing. He had his life–it was not worth much–not like a life...

Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.

Age doesn’t arrive slowly, it comes in a rush. One day nothing has changed, a week later, everything has. A week may be too long a time, it can happen overnight. You are the same...

Their life is mysterious, it is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density...

I can’t explain it. It’s what turns you to powder, being ground between what you can’t do and what you must do. You just turn to dust.

The book was in her lap; she had read no further. The power to change one’s life comes from a paragraph, a lone remark. The lines that penetrate us are slender, like the flukes that...

there comes a time in life, when you realize that everything is a dream; only those things which are written down have any possibility of being real.