Speaking the truth, once you have started it, is too exhilarating to draw back..

The strangest thing about life is not its frightful cruelty, but that it can be gentle..

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless..

There is a stage in any misery when the victim begins to find a deep satisfaction in it..

Happiness comes of the capacity to feel deeply, to enjoy simply, to think freely, to risk life, to be needed..

Language is memory and metaphor..

There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification..

The impossible talked of is less impossible from the moment words are laid to it..

There is only one world; the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive; this minute here and now. Th….

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma..

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present..

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received..

Writing was a chimney for my blazing ambitions..

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces..

Only one person in a thousand knows the trick of really living in the present. Most of us spend fifty-nine minutes an hour living in the past, with r….

I am never happier than when I am alone in a foreign city; it is as if I had become invisible..

The young are so much more vulnerable than the old - the stuff is still warm and malleable, it takes impressions..

Hope is a talent like any other..

Perhaps this is in the end what most marriages are - gentleness, memory, and habit..

War, for any cause, is inexcusable. There is nothing which excuses us for the beastly ingenuity of our wars. Only fools, only the diseased, think tha….

What I do not know and cannot even hope to understand before I die is why human beings are willfully, coldly, matter-of-factly cruel to each other ..….