“I am mad, I am going under, I must follow the advice of a friend, and pay no heed to myself.”

“God's only excuse is that he does not exist”

“For the future, I shall rely only upon those elements of my character which I have tested. Who would ever have said that I should find pleasure in shedding tears? That I should love the man who pro...”

“A novel is a mirror walking along a main road.”

“Indeed, man has two different beings inside him. What devil thought of that malicious touch?”

“Mathilde made an effort to use the more intimate form; she was evidently more attentive to this unusual way of speaking than to what she was saying. This use of the singular form, stripped of the t...”

“Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were vo...”

“When shrouded meanings and grim intentions are nicely polished up and pokerfaced personae are generously palming off their fantasy constructs, caution is the watchword, since rimpling water on the ...”

“Beware of the thief who is after your cash; but be more cautious of the thief in the mind that's after your kind, your promise - your dream, your future.”

“He dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her. Petra Cotes, for her part, loved him more...”

“When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.”

“When we cannot bear to be alone, it means we do not properly value the only companion we will have from birth to death - ourselves.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“I've always said that idleness dulls the spirit. We have to keep the brain busy, or at least the hands if we don't have a brain.”

“If your workplace was somehow transplanted into the jungle and everyone was forced to survive at a very primitive level, it's safe to say that eventually your boss would rape you.”