“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...”

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that youve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you sa...”

“As he read, I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once.”

“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there i...”

“If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.”

“Silence is the invisibility of talking. I'd take half an argument over half a silence any day. And I'd take peace and quiet over a full-blown argument any other day, unless it's Tuesday.”

“You dont know anything about me.No, I know not everything about you. But I sense enough to know you have mistaken obsession with drive, guilt with injustice. I know you want to escape what you are,...”

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

“The only honest way to approach the question of whiteness and blackness is to start by accepting that these are arbitrary categories that were invented in the 17th and 18th century in order to just...”

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be ...”