1. "A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying."
2. "For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential -- the imagination."
3. “Guilt always hurries towards its completion, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie.” 4. “I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.”
5. “It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.”
6. "It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness."
7. "It's unthinkable not to love -- you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin."
8. "Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will --whatever we may think."
9. “No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”
10. "Music is only love looking for words."
11. “Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”
12. "No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat."
13. “Our inventions mirror our secret wishes.”
14. “Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.”
15. “The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time . . . love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.”
16. “There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
17. “The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.”
18. "The woods were carpeted with flowers, sweet-smelling salvia, cranesbill, and a variety of ferns. Here and there, too, bright dots of scarlet showed him where the wild strawberries grew, and in these verdant woods the pines and beeches increased in size until he calculated that he was walking among glades of trees nearly a hundred feet in height. He could not help contrasting all this place and beauty with the grim errand upon which he was bent, and which might lead to him to sudden death."
19. “They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures-and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.”
20. “Travel can be one of the most rewarding forms of introspection.”
21. “Truth disappears with the telling of it.”
22. "'We become what we dream' said Balthazar, still hunting among those grey paving stones for the key to a watch which is Time. 'We achieve in reality, in substance, only the pictures of the imagination.' The city makes no answer to such propositions. Unheeding it coils about the sleeping lives like some great anaconda digesting a meal. Among those shining coils the pitiable human world goes its way, unaware and unbelieving, repeating to infinity its gestures of despair, repentance and love. Demonax the philosopher said: 'Nobody wishes to be evil!' and was called a cynic for his pains. And Pursewarden in another age, in another tongue, replied: 'Even to be halfawake among sleep-walkers is frightening at first. Later one learns to dissimulate!'"
23. “We live lives based upon selected fiction. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time - not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed.”
24. "You see, Justine, I believe that Gods are men and men Gods; they intrude on each other's lives, trying to express themselves through each other – hence such apparent confusion in our human states of mind, our intimations of powers within or beyond us."
