“I tell myself: There is only one true thing in our world, to satisfy one's heart, to feel and go to the bottom of all one's feelings, to desire and go to the bottom of all one's desires. Finally to live one's life, one's sincere life outside of all lies and all conventions before sinking into unavoidable nothingness.”

“The people in the world, and the objects in it, and the world as a whole, are not absolute things, but on the contrary, are the phenomena of perception... If we were all alike: if we were millions of people saying do, re, mi, in unison, One poet would be enough... But we are not alone, and everything needs expounding all the time because, as people live and die, each one perceiving life and death for himself, and mostly by and in himself, there develops a curiosity about the perceptions of others. This is what makes it possible to go on saying new things about old things.”

“Music is feeling, then not sound;And thus it is what i feel,Here in this room, desiring you,Thinking of your blue- shadowed silk Is music. It is like the strainWaked in elders...”

“A writer lives, at least, in a state of astonishment. Beneath any feeling he has of the good or evil of the world lies a deeper one of wonder at it all. To transmit that feeling, he writes.”

“There’s only one thing worse than not satisfying a desire. And that is not to feel any desire.”

“I stood there in the kitchen, watching her staring across the meadow still searching for her nemesis and I thought, suddenly, that this is all our lives - this is the one fact that applies to us all, that makes us what we are, our common mortality, our common humanity. One day someone is going to come and take us away: you don't need to have been a spy, I thought, to feel like this.”

“It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all.”