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The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men

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Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel.

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The poet is a faker / Who's so good at his act / He even fakes the pain / Of pain he feels in fact.

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I feel closer ties and more intimate bonds with certain characters in books, with certain images I’ve seen in engravings, than with many supposedly re...more

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I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone...more

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There are moments, such as the one that oppresses me now, when I feel my own self far more than I feel external things, and everything transforms into...more

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To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as...more

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Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; t...more

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There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street. There are images tucked away in books that live more vividly than many men and w...more