François Mauriac

If you would tell me the heart of a man, tell me not what he reads, but what he rereads.

No love, no friendship, can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever.

To love someone is to see a miracle invisible to others.

The effort of explaining, even of expressing himself, had become, with the years, more and more terrifying to him. Whether from laziness or from inability to find the right words, he had developed almost a passion for silence.

What a fool she was ever to have imagined that there might be some place in the world where she could sink to the earth with the knowledge that there were people round her who understood, who perhaps even admired and loved her! She was fated to carry loneliness about with her as a leper carries his scabs. No one can do anything for me: no one can do anything against me.

I believe that only poetry counts ... A great novelist is first of all a great poet.

We know well only what we are deprived of.

We are, all of us, molded and re-molded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain nonetheless their work—a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended.