“Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happ...”

“Thus I progressed on the surface of life, in the realm of words as it were, never in reality. All those books barely read, those friends barely loved, those cities barely visited, those women barel...”

“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”

“Don't lies eventually lead to the truth? And don't all my stories, true or false, tend toward the same conclusion? Don't they all have the same meaning? So what does it matter whether they are true...”

“False judges are held up in the worlds admiration and I alone know the true ones.”

“He had been bored, that's all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen - and that explains most human comm...”

“I was left behind with the immensity of existing things. A river, suffering because reflections of clouds and tress and not clouds and trees.”

“Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as Ive said before, bugs in amber.”

“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

“...After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.”

“No one's serious at seventeen,When lindens line the promenades”

“...After you have done everything to please a man and he's taken his pleasure with you, all you are for him is a whore, and a whore's daughter.”

“see chains on another person and be glad they are not your own--such was the good fortune permitted colored people, defined by how much worse it could be at any moment.”

“Hard work increases the probability of serendipity.”

“Time wasn't the same anymore. Doors were slamming shut before we even knew they'd been opened. Good fortune can take forever to get to you, but as it turns out, sorrow is as quick as a shot.”