In the human heart there is a ceaseless birth of passions, so that the destruction of one is almost always the establishment of another.

Good advice is something a man gives when he is too old to set a bad example.

All women are flirts, but some are restrained by shyness, and others by sense.

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.

A work can become modern only if it is first postmodern. Postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this state is constant.

When we are unable to find tranquility within ourselves, it is useless to seek it elsewhere.

There is only one kind of love, but there are a thousand imitations.

Nothing hinders a thing from being natural so much as the straining ourselves to make it seem so.

Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.

Most people know no other way of judging men's worth but by the vogue they are in, or the fortunes they have met with.

There are no accidents so unlucky from which clever people are not able to reap some advantage, and none so lucky that the foolish are not able to turn them to their own disadvantage.

As the poet says, all happy couples are alike, it's the unhappy ones who create the stories. I'm no longer a story. Happiness has made me fade into real life.

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?--it is the same the angels breathe.

gifts — that strange word, a signifier meaning disappointment you can hold in your hands.

You have to say I am forgiven again and again until it becomes the story you believe about yourself.

As you get older, you change certain things.

Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.

Leningrad ... is a city with the gift of timelessness.

I was in fact pretty much - by the larger culture, by the local culture, by people around me, by people on TV - encouraged to imagine women as something slightly inferior to men.

Walking. I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

What if the Church and the State Are the mob that howls at the door! Wine shall run thick to the end, Bread taste sour.