Reading is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. - Marcel Proust

An hour is not merely an hour; it is a vase full of scents and sounds and projects and climates.

But even with respect to the most insignificant things in life, none of us constitutes a material whole, identical for everyone, which a person has only to go look up as though we were a book of specifications or a last testament; our social personality is a creation of the minds of others.

The fault I find with our journalism is that it forces us to take an interest in some fresh triviality or other every day, whereas only three or four books in a lifetime give us anything that is of real importance. Suppose that, every morning, when we tore the wrapper off our paper with fevered hands, a transmutation were to take place, and we were to find inside it — oh! I don't know; shall we say Pascal's Pensées?