“A lawful kiss is never worth as much as a stolen one.”

“One sometimes weeps over one's illusions with as much bitterness as over a death.”

“It is the encounters with people that make life worth living.”

“It is the lives we encounter that make life worth living.”

“It is love that is sacred," she said." Listen, child, to an old woman who has seen three generations, and who has had a long experience of men and women. Marriage and love have nothing in common. We marry to found a family, and we form families in order to constitute society. Society cannot dispense with marriage. If society is a chain, each family is a link in that chain. In order to weld those links, we always seek metals of the same order. When we marry, we must bring together suitable conditions; we must combine fortunes, unite similiar races and aim at the common interest, which is riches and children. We marry only once, my child, because the world requires us to do so, but we love twenty times in one lifetime because nature has made us like this. Marriage, you see, is law and love is an instinct which impels us, sometimes along a straight, and sometimes along a devious path. The world has made laws to combat our instincts- it was necessary to make them; but our instincts are always stronger, and we ought not to resist them too much, because they come from God; while laws come from men. If we did not perfume life with love, as much love as possible,darling, as we put sugar into drugs for children, nobody would care to take it just as it is.”

“The kiss itself is immortal. It travels from lip to lip, century to century, from age to age. Men and women garner these kisses, offer them to others and then die in turn.”

“I had kissed her at odd times, in out of the way corners, in the manner of a mountain guide, nothing more.”