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[...] Friendship never depends on promises or protestation, nor on time and space. Friendship is absolutely undemanding, except on one point. Friendship demands honesty, the only demand, but difficult.
[...] perhaps this is what the beginning of true ageing is like. More and more, we lose our way in obscure halls and winding unswept corridors. We talk to each other through faulty local telephones and stumble headlong over a reserve hard to detect.
I had slept well on a bench in the shade and now the summoning bell was ringing and I pattered into church in my bare feet. The pastor’s wife took my hand and pressed me down at her side in the front pew below the pulpit. I would rather have sat in the organ loft, but the pastor’s wife was in the advanced stages of pregnancy and I couldn’t possibly squeeze past her. I immediately felt the need to pee and realized my distress would last a long time. (Church services and bad theatre last longer than anything else in the world. If you ever feel life is rushing along too fast, go to church or the theatre. Then time stops and you think there’s something wrong with your watch and as Strindberg says in Srorm: ‘Life is short but it can be long while it lasts.’)
lol
The secret of being happy consists of knowing how to enjoy yourself -- enjoy being at table, in bed, enjoy standing up, sitting down, enjoy the nearest ray of sunshine, the slightest bit of landscape: in other words, love everything. Thus it follows that to be happy you must already be so -- there's no bread without leavening.
When you write, you feel how it must be, you know that at such a spot a certain thing is needed, at another spot something else; you compose pictures for yourself that you see, you have rather the feeling that you are going to bring something to flower; you feel it in your heart like the distant echo of all the passions you are going to create; and the inability to render all that is the eternal despair of those who write; the poverty of languages, which have scarcely one word for a hundred thoughts; the weakness of man, who cannot find approximations -- and to me it is an eternal anguish.
Oh my God, my God, why did you cause me to be born with so much ambition? [...]