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‘When one has lived so much for others it is quite hard to turn oneself back again— to live for oneself.’

‘thunder booms outside. Rain falls hard against the roof. Somehow the rain is the exact sound she was looking for. The world outside sounds like how she feels inside. Stormy. Menacing. Foul.’

‘and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.’

‘I began to think of this house of mine, of this fireside, of some of you, and with such thoughts came a longing that was pain.’

‘Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance, and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown past into the unknown future.’

‘“you no longer believe in anything,” ...
“That’s not quite true.”
“What do you believe in?”
“People’s suffering, and the fact that it is abominable. One should do everything to abolish it.”’

‘nothing exists except for particular instances. Generalities do not prove anything.’

‘Sometimes I would go so deeply to sleep on my divan that on waking I felt dazed and intensely distressed— it was as though my consciousness, rising up secretly from the darkness, were hesitating before taking flesh again.’

‘The warm physical pleasure of tears running down my cheek. What a relief! It is so tiring to hate someone you love.’

‘When you love someone, you must give the people he loves credit for being of some value.’

‘When I was a child, when I was an adolescent, books saved me from despair.’

‘Sadness can be wept away. But the impatience of delight— it is not so easy to get rid of that.’

‘I find the newness of the landscape sparingly obvious; yet I cannot remember having seen it look otherwise.’

‘If you really want to communicate you manage, somehow or other. Not with everybody, of course, but with two or three people.’

‘So I must not want to die. And if I don’t want to die, I’ve got to start living.’

‘She reaches for the highest laurels, not because they are hanging slightly lower for a moment but because they are the highest; if it were in her power she would hang them higher still.’

‘When I’m panicked, I say them aloud to myself. I’m here. I don’t usually feel that I am. I feel like a warm gust of wind could exhale my way and I’d be disappeared forever, not even a sliver of fingernail left behind. On some days, I find this thought calming; on others it chills me.’

‘I ached once, hard, like a period typed at the end of a sentence.’

‘There is no greater sorrow / Than to be mindful of the happy time / In misery’

‘No hope doth comfort them for evermore, / Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.’

‘Was he a beast if music could move him so?’

‘ “Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.”
“Even when one has been wounded by it, ...

‘Society— civilized society, at least— is never very ready to believe anything to the detriment of those who are both rich and fascinating.’

‘There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.’

‘Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.’