What an uncertain thing, marriage – what an elusive thing, happiness!

It is harder to cut our gains than to cut our losses.

Endurance is frequently a form of indecision.

The half-hour of crowded anticipation, how fully it pays for the sterile hour that follows!

Can one end anything? A chapter, a paragraph, a sentence even? Doesn’t everything one has ever done go on living in spite of subsequent events?

All my life, I have loved balloons – all balloons – the heavy English sort, immense and round, that have to be pushed about, and the gay, light, gas-filled French ones that soar into the air the moment you let go of them.

Irony is the hygiene of the mind.

Temptations make one very censorious. If you are virtuous you condemn the wicked and if you are wicked, you condemn the virtuous.

Perfect moments don’t turn into half-hours.

The image of ourselves in the minds of others is the picture of a stranger we shall never see.

The Ten Commandments don’t tell you what you ought to do: They only put ideas into your head.

You don’t have to signal a social conscience by looking like a frump. Lace knickers won‘t hasten the holocaust, you can ban the bomb in a feather boa just as well as without, and a mild interest in the length of hemlines doesn’t necessarily disqualify you from reading Das Kapital and agreeing with every word.

Influencing people is dangerous. Their acts and thoughts become your illegitimate children. You can’t get away from them and Heaven knows what they mayn’t grow up into.

Isn’t that what love means, to fill ordinary, commonplace, conventional things with magic and significance, not to need the moon and white scent-heavy flowers at night?

We often call a certainty a hope, to bring it luck.

Friendship is a difficult, dangerous job. It is also (though we rarely admit it) extremely exhausting.

We learn nothing by being right.

What is it one yearns for? It is to be able to do a thing for the first time again. And that is impossible.

What we buy belongs to us only when the price is forgotten.

Blessed are those who give without remembering and take without forgetting.

To some people, the impossible is impossible. One fine day, they wake up in the morning knowing that they will never hold the moon in their hands, and with the certainty, perfect peace descends on them.

Are there any punishments in life but our joys turned against us?

Oh, youth is a wicked, cruel thing – eating miracles with its breakfast and not knowing they are not porridge.

Happiness is the moment when you cease to make an inventory of joys; it is a glow, a brightness – never a list.

Only the artists interest me whose hearts beat in unison with the poignant misery of the world. If you have not felt that, you have not lived. Pity is essential.

The only thing that matters is to have charm and expression. Then comes that horrible gnawing doubt of our own magnetism. Is it possible that, though we are not lovely, we are not irresistible either? That we will have to go through life belonging neither to the triumphantly beautiful nor to the triumphantly ugly?

Happiness is a light, an atmosphere, an illumination. It sets a personality. I always feel that it is a creation that is difficult for some and easy for others, but essentially an achievement, never an accident.

Seeing through is rarely seeing into.

It is never good dwelling on good-byes … it is not the being together that it prolongs, it is the parting.

My soul has gained the freedom of the night

To others we are not ourselves but performers in their lives cast for a part we do not even know we are playing.

There is something very independent about French balloons – you feel you couldn’t make a pet of one.

To some people the impossible is impossible.