…inebriation brings about for an hour or two a state of subjective idealism, pure phenomenalism; everything is reduced to appearances and exists only… - Marcel Proust

When two people part it is the one who is not in love who makes the tender speeches.

real books should be the offspring not of daylight and casual talk but of darkness and silence

...the salient feature of the absurd age I was at — an age which for all its alleged awkwardness, is prodigiously rich — is that reason is not its guide, and the most insignificant attributes of other people always appear to be consubstantial with their personality. One lives among monsters and gods, a stranger to peace of mind. There is scarcely a single one of our acts from that time which we would not prefer to abolish later on. But all we should lament is the loss of the spontaneity that urged them upon us. In later life, we see things with a more practical eye, one we share with the rest of society; but adolescence was the only time when we ever learned anything.