ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, f… - Simone de Beauvoir

She was beautiful, with a beauty so severe and so solitary that at first it was startling. "Ah! If only there were two of me," she thought, "one doing the talking and one listening, one living and one watching, how I would love myself. I'd envy no one."

— There you are. The sight of the changing world is miraculous and heartbreaking, both at the same time. — But so it is for me too. The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.

[T]he Sahara was a spectacle as alive as the sea. The tints of the dunes changed according to the time of day and the angle of the light: golden as apricots from far off, when we drove close to them they turned to freshly made butter; behind us they grew pink; from sand to rock, the materials of which the desert was made varied as much as its tints.