The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures...This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

...she studies to be equal in a world that is no longer surprised at anything

Men can be pitiless towards a woman whose body has eluded them, particularly if this is thanks to their own cowardice.

Their own life together was like a subtle watercolor sketch, invisible to other people. They gave the world what it required of them and for the rest of the time were content to be forgotten.

The loudspeaker on the wall crackles, hisses, and suddenly announces, in astonishingly soothing tones, that a train is going to be delayed. An ocean swell of sighs ripples through the waiting room.

White is actually one of my favorite colors. I have a white car. I love white.

I'm six-foot-five. I'm not going to win the gold medal in figure skating. But I can try, and that's what matters. Trying.

There, that is our secret: go to sleep! You will wake, and remember, and understand.

The Milky Way is nothing else but a mass of innumerable stars planted together in clusters.

All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue.

cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.

I started acting when I was 10, doing musical theater. I was a brunette at that time. I was always cast in all the exotic parts.

Nobody living average, everybody jang-a-lang. Nobody living savage, everybody got change.

Everything in nature goes by law, and not by luck.

I confess I take perverse delight as a theologian in the controversies surrounding postmodernism.