“He insisted on clearing the table, and again devoted himself to his game of patience: piecing together the map of Paris, the bits of which hed stuffed into the pocket of his raincoat, folded up any...”

“The Oberge des Mailletz is by far the oldest tavern of which any record can found in the City archives. In 1292, Adam des Mailletz, inn-keeper, paid a tithe of 18 sous and 6 deniers.This we learn f...”

“An historian is a kind detective in search of the fact remote or otherwise - that brings to a set of events apparently unconnected with each other, the link that unites them, their justification, ...”

“No one will shake my conviction that those leaders of men, who are in the nature of carbuncles, of semi-conscious abscesses, who draw feverish crowds to them like noxious humours, have an innate kn...”

“Men are so isolated, prisoners of their own wretched selves, that they can be unbelievably sociable.”

“Silence, like madness, is only comparative.”

“Know that it is a corpse who loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!...Look, I am not laughing now, crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore ...”

“I crawled over the mountain of death, Watching the corpses roll down like the stones. Searching for the light which everyone always spoke of. I fought the wolves and also the death, and knocked the...”

“God wasn't love, couldn't be love. Because for me, love was a corpse.”

“But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:they might point to the catkins hangingfrom the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the raindescending on black earth in early spring. ...”

“Life is but a dream for the dead.”

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”