Dinner-parties bore us because our imagination is absent, and reading interests us because it is keeping us company. - Marcel Proust

She's got feet like boats, whiskers like an American, and her undies are filthy.

Knowledge of the thing cannot impede it; but at least we have the things we discover, if not in our hands, at least in thought, and there they are at your disposal, which inspires us to the illusory hope of enjoying a kind of dominion over them.

Ideas are substitutes for sorrows; when the latter change into ideas they lose part of their noxious action on our hearts and even at the first instant their very transformation disengages a feeling of joy.