The Ten Commandments don't tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.
All my life, I have loved balloons - all balloons - the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.
There is something very independent about French balloons - you feel you couldn't make a pet of one.
To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.
The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?
Irony is the hygiene of the mind.
Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.
Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn't everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?
Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.
I do not know at what moment in life, if ever, we realise that we are neither George Sands nor Juliets. Of course, if we are not beautiful, we recognise early that beauty is nothing.
What you possess is not what you jingle in the pockets of your memory, but the imaginings with which you fill the spaces of the future.
It is better not to sit on the grass after thirty when sprawling at all is difficult, let alone sprawling gracefully.
The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!
