"I am my own heaven and hell."

“I don’t want to repeat my innocence, I want the pleasure of losing it again.”

He had realized at last what he wanted — to kiss her again, to find rest in her great immobility. She was the end of all restlessness, all malcontent.

It seemed that the only lover she had ever wanted was a lover in a dream.

Life consists of rare individual moments of the highest significance and countless intervals in which at best the phantoms of those moments hover about us. Love, spring, a beautiful melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea – they all speak truly to our heart only once: if they ever do in fact truly find speech.

Where is beauty to be found? In great things that, like everything else, are doomed to die, or in small things that aspire to nothing, yet know how to set a jewel of infinity in a single moment?

Unless we choose to ignore reality, we must find our values in it.

The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity’s most powerful and senseless desire—the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered important?

May the space between where I am and where I want to be inspire me.

I see myself forever and ever as the ridiculous person, the lonely soul, the wanderer, the restless frustrated artist, the person in love with love, always in search of the absolute, always seeking the unattainable.

Truly powerful women don’t explain why they want respect. They simply don’t engage those who don’t give it to them.

People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.

I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

…and I am going to say a very pretentious thing to you. No one understands me; I belong to another world.

Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Soon you’ll realize that many people will love the idea of you but will lack the maturity to handle the reality of you.