“Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”

“To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.”

“People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along.”

“...and the country is like a great unfolded mantle with a green velvet cape bordered with a fringe of silver.”

“Its hard to communicate anything exactly and thats why perfect relationships between people are difficult to find.”

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

“A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”

“Prose divides shame into stations.”

“He lifted his arm that had been resting on her shoulders and gazed at the words she had written on his hand. He had been branded as cattle are branded to show whom they belong to. The cold mountain...”