Giovanni's Room

I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.

one of the real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright—and it’s true that nobody stays in the garden of Eden.

world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

It seemed, then, that a lifetime would not be long enough for me to act with Joey the act of love.

bed, in its sweet disorder, testified to vileness.

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden,” Jacques said. And then: “I wonder why.”

But people can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

Then, for the first time in my life, I was really aware of another person’s body, of another person’s smell.

I told her that I had loved her once and I made myself believe it.

for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.