Don't cry, I'm sorry to have deceived you so much, but that's how life is.

Here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in kindly mirrors of future times. . . . To find in objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern . . .

Human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece

You have to be an artist and a madman...

We all have such fateful objects -- it may be a recurrent landscape in one case, a number in another -- carefully chosen by the gods to attract events of specific significance for us: here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break.

Life is a great sunrise. I do not see why death should not be an even greater one.