“An infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

“And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

“There are two infinities that confuse me: the one in my soul devours me; the one around me will crush me”

“[Hers] was an existence between heaven and earth... beyond her stretched as far as the eye could see... an immense space of joys and passions...[But] did not love, like flowers, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears cried into yielding hands...the fevers of the flesh and the langours of tenderness...”

“The more you approach infinity, the deeper you penetrate terror”

“For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.”

“How wonderful to find in living creatures the same substance as those which make up minerals. Nevertheless they felt a sort of humiliation at the idea that their persons contained phosphorous like matches, albumen like white of egg, hydrogen gas like street lamps.”