“History is a novel that has been lived, a novel is history that could have been.”

“[He] went on to say that during all those years he had done nothing at all, that all he had felt had been a need to live, to live actively, violently, noisily, a need to sing, to make music, to roam the woods, to drink a little too much and get involved in a brawl.”

“Today I begin to understand what love must be, if it exists. When we are parted, we each feel the lack of the other half of ourselves. We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence.”

“I have always derived indescribable pleasure from leading a decent woman to the edge of sin and leaving her there to live between the temptation and the fear of that sin.”

“A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.”

“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.”

“A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.”