“with one image he would make that beauty explode into me.”

“...the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment..”

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

“I cannot express the uneasiness caused in me by this intrusion of mystery and beauty into a room I had at last filled with myself to the point of paying no more attention to the room than to that self. The anesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.”

“Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have of them.”

“The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except herhusband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she hadalways felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that shedisplayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, of a will that wouldnever bend, the sort under which alone nervous people can findtranquillity.”

“There is no one, no matter how wise he is, who has not in his youth saidthings or done things that are so unpleasant to recall in later life thathe would expunge them entirely from his memory if that were possible.”