The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.

---

I am overwhelmed with things I ought to have written about and never found the proper words.

---

It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple: one must be a woman manly, or a man womanly.

---

Growing up is losing some illusions, in order to acquire others.

---

To make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action.

---

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

---

There must be another life, she thought, sinking back into her chair, exasperated. Not in dreams; but here and now, in this room, with living people. She felt as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice with her hair blown back; she was about to grasp something that just evaded her. There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves.

---

I feel all shadows of the universe multiplied deep inside my skin.

---

I really don't advise a woman who wants to have things her own way to get married

---

I always had the deepest affection for people who carried sublime tears in their silences.

---