What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Did you ever have a conversation with someone who misunderstood everything you had to say? It's exhausting, and the ironic part is that the more you try and explain yourself, the more mixed up things become. Your best friend knows when you're kidding, venting, and tired. He or she knows you and therefore doesn't read into the things you say.

We are, all of us, molded and remolded by those who have loved us, and though that love may pass, we remain none the less their work--a work that very likely they do not recognize, and which is never exactly what they intended.

Being for every man the touchstone of faith and love, the Eucharist, like on the Cross, divided the minds as soon as it was announced... Nothing engages a man as much as does the Eucharist

Let us be wary of ready-made ideas about cowardice and courage: the same burden weighs infinitely more heavily on some shoulders than on others.

A man's passion for the mountain is, above all, his childhood which refuses to die.

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

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

This God who, as the psalmist said, built His tabernacles in the sun, now establishes Himself in the very core of the flesh and the blood.

Doubt is nothing but a trivial agitation on the surface of the soul, while deep down there is a calm certainty.

The arrogance of poets is only a defense doubt gnaws the greatest among them they need our testimony to escape despair.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

A writer is essentially a man who does not resign himself to loneliness.

The temples of those who deny the Real Presence are like corpses. The Lord was taken away and we do not know where they have laid Him.

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

Every novel worthy of the name is like another planet, whether large or small, which has its own laws just as it has its own flora and fauna.