while I felt his anguish entering into me, like acid

It became terribly old and at the same time absolutely, helplessly young.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness,

Perhaps he is a fool and a coward but almost everybody is one or the other and most people are both.

People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. Hella would not be on the high seas. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine.

But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” Jacques said. And then: “I wonder why.”

Confusion is a luxury which only the very, very young can possibly afford and you are not that young anymore.”