“Louise Colet was a proto-feminist who committed the sin of wanting to make someone else happy.”

“But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you.”

“What makes us want to know the worst? Is it that we tire of preferring to know the best? Does curiosity always hurdle self-interest? Or is it, more simply, that wanting to know the worst is love's favorite perversion.”

“If you want to make people pay attention to what you're saying, you don't raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention.”

“Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.”

“Yes, of course we were pretentious -- what else is youth for?”

“You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?”