It is comforting when one has a sorrow to lie in the warmth of one's bed and there, abandoning all effort and all resistance, to b...ury even one's head under the cover, giving one's self up to it completely, moaning like branches in the autumn wind. But there is still a better bed, full of divine odors. It is our sweet, our profound, our impenetrable friendship.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The New Testament is an invaluable book, though I confess to having been slightly prejudiced against it in my very early days by t...he church and the Sabbath-school, so that it seemed, before I read it, to be the yellowest book in the catalogue. Yet I early escaped from their meshes. It is hard to get the commentaries out of one's head and taste its true flavor.... It would be a poor story to be prejudiced against the Life of Christ because the book has been edited by Christians. In fact, I love this book rarely, though it is a sort of castle in the air to me, which I am permitted to dream.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One usually dies because one is alone, or because one has got into something over one's head. One often dies because one does not ...have the right alliances, because one is not given support. In Sicily the Mafia kills the servants of the State that the State has not been able to protect.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Strong emotional experiences are for the most part impersonal. Anyone who has hated another person so much that only chance stands... between that person and death knows this, as does whoever has fallen into the catastrophe of a deep depression, anyone who has loved a woman to the dregs, anyone who has beaten others bloody or ever come up behind another person with muscles trembling. "Losing one's head," language calls it. Emotional experience is, in itself, poor in qualities; qualities are brought to it by the person who has the experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"The only one who has ever been really mysterious." (Joan Crawford); "Her mystery was as thick as a London fog." (Tallulah Bankhea...d); "In a quick turn of her head, in a frank look, a boyish pout, in that proud glance from lowered lids, so pitying and yet so distant that in others it would be supercilious, in all those expressions of conscious beauty, which when imitated become clumsy, or arrogant, or ridiculous, there is a manifestation of what Hollywood cannot destroy. In the presence of this mystery all that is second-rate can be forgotten." (Cecil Beaton)LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To have one's mother-in-law in the country when one lives in Paris, and vice versa, is one of those strokes of luck that one encou...nters only too rarely.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The gap between the committed and the indifferent is a Sahara whose faint trails, followed by the mind's eye only, fade out in san...d.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with... the beastly words that stand for them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »