“Life goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young.”
“Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will live on a long time after nutriment has ceased”
“One only makes books in order to keep in touch with one's fellows after one has ceased to breath, and thus to defend oneself against the inexorable fate of all that lives - transitoriness and oblivion.”
“One of the qualities of liberty is that, as long as it is being striven after, it goes on expanding. Therefore, the man who stands in the midst of the struggle and says, "I have it," merely shows by doing so that he has just lost it.”
“When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardor and that illumination. Forsakingbeauty and the sensual happiness attached to it, exclusively servingmisfortune, calls for a nobility I lack. But, after all, nothing is true that forces one to exclude.”
“To remember love after long sleep; to turn again to poetry after a year in the market place, or to youth after resignation to drowsy and stiffening age; to remember what once you thought life could hold, after telling over with muddied and calculating fingers what it has offered; this is music, made after long silence. The soul flexes its wings, and, clumsy as any fledgling, tries the air again”