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.

“For a woman,” she said, “I think a man is always a stranger. And there’s something awful about being at the mercy of a stranger.”

“Maybe everything bad that happens to you makes you weaker,”

“Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

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.