The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.
Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.
Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.
Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.
The memory of man is as old as misfortune
Somewhere in the heart of experience there is an order and a coherence which we might purprise if we were attentive enough, loving enough, or patient enough.
It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.
Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.
I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.
Life is like a cucumber. One minute it's in your hand, the next it's up you ass.
Love is like trench warfare - you cannot see the enemy, but you know he is there and that it is wiser to keep your head down.
We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it.
Art like life is an open secret.
History is an endless repetition of the wrong way of living.
Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.
These are the moments which are not calculable, and cannot be assessed in words; they live on in the solution of memory, like wonderful creatures, unique of their own kind, dredged up from the floors of some unexplored ocean.
It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.
…I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people…who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication. These born “islomanes”…are direct descendents of the Atlanteans
A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.
I have been thinking about the girl I met last night in the mirror: dark on the marble-ivory white: glossy black hair: deep suspiring eyes in which one's glances sink because they are nervous, curious, turned to sexual curiosity.
A diary is the last place to go if you wish to seek the truth about a person. Nobody dares to make the final confession to themselves on paper: or at least, not about love.
Prohibitions create the desire they were intended to cure.
Gamblers and lovers really play to lose.
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