“We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.”

“If we are to make reality endurable, we must all nourish a fantasy or two.”

“I knew very well that this hope was chimerical. I was like a pauper who mingles fewer tears with his dry bread if he tells himself that at any moment a stranger will bequeath to him his fortune. We must all, in order to make reality more tolerable, keep alive in us a few little follies.”

“We betroth ourselves by proxy, and then feel obliged to marry the intermediary.”

“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”

“With the girls, on the other hand, if the pleasure which I enjoyed was selfish, at least it was not based on the lie which seeks to make us believe that we are not irremediably alone and prevents us from admitting that, when we chat, it is no longer we who speak, that we are fashioning ourselves then in the likeness of other people and not of a self that differs from them.”

“Love is a striking example of how little reality means to us.”