Marguerite Yourcenar

Every invalid is a prisoner.

Memoirs of Hadrian ... Catastrophe and ruin will come disorder will triumph, but order will too, from time to time.

Men who care passionately for women attach themselves at least as much to the temple and to the accessories of the cult as to their goddess herself.

The memory of most men is an abandoned cemetery where lie, unsung and unhonored, the dead whom they have ceased to cherish. Any lasting grief is reproof to their forgetfulness.

I have never seasoned a truth with the sauce of a lie in order to digest it more easily.

If I make it, I will carry a pencil instead of the ritual sword.

Leaving behind books is even more beautiful -- there are far too many children.

When two texts, or two assertions, perhaps two ideas, are in contradiction, be ready to reconcile them rather than cancel one by the other regard them as two different facets, or two successive stages, of the same reality, a reality convincingly human just because it is complex.

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.