“In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us.”

“It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…”

“At that shameful stage in the development of our criticism, literary abuse would overstep all limits of decorum; literature itself was a totally extraneous matter in critical articles: they were pure invective, a vulgar battle of vulgar jokes, double-entendres, the most vicious calumnies and offensive constructions. It goes without saying, that in this inglorious battle, the only winners were those who had nothing to lose as far as their good name was concerned. My friends and I were totally deluded. We imagined ourselves engaged in the subtle philosophical disputes of the portico or the academy, or at least the drawing room. In actual fact we were slumming it.”

“Nothing so removes a man from his inner, mysterious, real life, nothing makes him so deaf and dumb as the picture of these petty passions and petty crimes which calls itself the world of politics.”

“Pride is the chalice into which all human sins are poured: it glitters and jingles and its arabesque lures your gaze, while your lips involuntarily touch the seductive beverage.”

“Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.”

“You see - the moulded whimsy of a friezeon a portico keeps us from recognizing,sometimes, the symmetry of the whole...You will leave; we'll forget one another;but now and then the name of a street,or a street organ weeping in the twilight,will remind us in a more vivid and moretruthful way than thought could resurrector words convey, of that main thingwhich was between us, the main thing whichwe do not know ... And in that hour, the soulwill miraculously sense the charmof past trifles, and we will understandthat in eternity all is eternal”