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It was indeed true that there was one whom she loved better; but of what avail was it to love a man who, when he came to her, would speak to her of nothing but the charms which he found in another woman!

Am I wrong in saying that change is easy to you, or have I grown to be so old that you can talk to me as if those far-away follies ought to be forgotten? Was it so long ago? Talk of love! I tell you, sir, that your heart is one in which love can have no durable hold.

But as he went up to London he told himself that the air of the House of Commons was now the very breath of his nostrils. Life to him without it would be no life.

The tango, which already had an international passport and had been much cleaned up in Paris, still was not liked by decent people [in Argentina] who knew that it came from the brothel and that it was sexual and aggressive.

Mlle Melanie de Saint-André's journal would easily have filled three hundred printed pages. Having the taste and discernment that a bachelor of letters can have, I [Balzac] reduced these camorous meanderings to their proper size. The writings of lovers are all cowardly, diffuse, filled with repetitions, and it is not a little task to condense them.

Can you imagine a chaste love, a feeling which has not been frightened by even the appearance of a loving caress: in the end, a holy tenderness, whose testimonies are pure like a drop of dew which adorns the calyx of a morning flower; take exactly the notion of this beauty of feeling, and you will understand what I feel for you.

My friend, despite the severe countenance and the wild manners which you affect, a secret instinct has always told me that you possessed one of those souls susceptible to exaltation, burning, which only conceive what is great and sublime, that in the end you understand love, that feeling of a hero....

Believe me, Finn, if you want to be useful, you must submit yourself in such matters to those with whom you act.

ALIFANO: But why is time ungraspable? BORGES: Undoubtedly, because time is made up of memory. We are each, to a great extent, made up of our poor and frail memory. And that memory is made up largely of forgetfulness.

Madame Max Goesler never lets any man go without entrancing him. If you have anything near your heart, Mr. Finn, Madame Max Goesler touched it, I'm sure.

Although it may seem odd, Japan is the most civilized country that I've known.

There was something in the hard, dry, unsympathising, unchanging virtues of her husband which almost revolted her. He had not a fault, but she had tried him at every point and had been able to strike no spark of fire from him. Even by disobeying she could produce no heat,—only an access of firmness.

That's the whole mystery: to have the mind submit. It must serve, not dominate, life. That's a major point in so many mythologies. The mind dominating life is really Satan, and life speaking through the mind is the power of the Christ. That's basic; that's the Buddha.

Do not give way to pride.
For a brief while your strength is in bloom
but it fades quickly; and soon there will follow
illness or the sword to lay you low....

The story is familiar to me, but for some reason, I have never read any Wells to date.

All my life, I have been strangely, vividly conscious of another region—not far removed from our own world in one sense, yet wholly different in kind—where great things go on unceasingly, where immense and terrible personalities hurry by, intent on vast purposes compared to which earthly affairs ... are all as dust in the balance.

The gray bleak summer of '78 has passed into the gales and tumultuous rains of September. There's a feeling of autumn in the air, a first delicious morning chill on fingers and cheeks.

But he would go back now as a cur with his tail between his legs,—kicked out, as it were, from Parliament. Returning to Lincoln's Inn soiled with failure, having accomplished nothing, having broken down on the only occasion on which he had dared to show himself on his legs.

The world was, for us, a vast desert free of people; our passion filled it, and we had only left our solitude, to find another which caused us to regret the former.

When history seems to offer no sanctuary for values (when history is assailed by wars and inhuman or immoral public actions), literature can provide a model, often as horrendous as that of history, but one which by virtue of its fictional nature is bound to keep an ironic, parodic, aesthetic or philosophical distance from what is at risk in immediate experience or direct reflection.

I do not know many people who would be pleased by the simple description of events which marked our years of happiness. They seem to belong to another time, rather than to our modern century....

I am an adult, I am my own master, I know no one whose will can be imposed on me, I will leave if you torment me; for I have done nothing reprehensible: I believe that I am good, virtuous, religious, I have not opposed anyone!... If someone opposes me!... I will break anyone who gets in my way: I can.

Why learn to drive your chariot better when you are close to the finishing post? All you have to consider then is how to make your exit. If an old man has something o learn, it is the art of dying, and this is precisely what occupies people least my age; we think of anything rather than that.