My ambition is to one day shed my wardrobe and figure out how to look like Gilles Bensimon - or a famous stylist - who travels with a Birkin bag and minimal accoutrement and somehow looks cool.

‎He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.

There's nowhere that life feels more eternal, your dimwit youth more important, than Paris.

Like everyone I slipped into adulthood like a delinquent through the back door.

When you're my age, you'll see that it is wiser to make your own decisions than let time make decisions for you.

It had been a perfect nap - the sort a man runs into now and again by chance.

Her strength was in the integrity of her actions; she never compromised what she believed she ought to do.

The two things, love and snow, that make the world look fresh again

When I was younger I always had a dark navy, black tie and everybody would look at me like it was odd, but now it is de rigueur. I'm sure it's my input.

‎'He often envied people who hadn't read his favourite books. They had such happiness before them.

I guess the lesson is you can’t go everywhere. You should still go everywhere you can.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

MASHA: Isn’t there some meaning?TOOZENBACH: Meaning? … Look out there, it’s snowing. What’s the meaning of that?

She was his life, his everything.

I am so fresh in soul and spirit that life gushes and bubbles around me in a thousand springs.

Are not all religions strange to those who stand outside of them?

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

It’s up to you, not fate. True. But it was also up to Lily. That was the trickiest part.

Governments institutionalize something for nothing.

It is disgraceful when the passers-by exclaim, "O ancient house! alas, how unlike is thy present master to thy former one.

It seems as if when you try to do just one thing and nothing but, you can't do it at all. You do everything better if there's more than one thing.