I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself.
I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.
Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about. In my prison, when the sky turned red and a new day slipped into my cell, I found out that she was right.
I felt as I hadn’t felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I’d realized how all these people loathed me.
Humans are creatures, who spent their lifes trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd.
What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.
We don’t have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.
A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.
I had been right I was still right I was always right. I had lived my life one way and I could just as well lived it another. I had done this and I hadn t done that. I hadn t done this thing and I had done another. And so?
And indeed it could be said that once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of plague was ended.
I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
Give up the tyranny of female charm.
True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.
Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.
Here lives a free man. Nobody serves him.
For who would dare to assert that eternal happiness can compensate for a single moment’s human suffering.
But when a man has had only four hours’ sleep he isn’t sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.
Believe me, for certain men at least, not taking what one doesn’t desire is the hardest thing in the world.