There is something divine in mindless beauty.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.

There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.

The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.

...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...

Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

A good relationship with our children is the ultimate comfort we have while dying.

Love is elixir that keeps you alive. Love is poison that kills you. Unreciprocated love keeps you alive, but kills every day.

Don’t resent the sky for its storms

You're handsome and you have a nice accent, and a chest that would make a nun perspire.

It is good taste and good taste alone that possesses the power to sterilize and is always the first handicap to any creative functioning.

Women, unlike most men, are able to accept mystery, accept whatever comes to them - even if it's not logical.

I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

I didn't really think of myself as being a muse.

I hate to think that we may be out there seven to ten years out and dependent on the Russians for our journey into space.

I've never broken a bone in my life, or in my body.