Style, like sheer silk underwear, sometimes hides eczema.
Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only on it. The creature is my native land. This is why I have chosen this absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on the side of the struggle.
You are only excused for happiness and success if you generously agree to share them. But if one is to be happy, one should not worry too much about other people – which means there is no way out. Happy and judged or absolved and miserable.
Rats died in the street; men in their homes. And newspapers are concerned only with the street.
If you must die, I’ll envy even the earth that wraps your body.
When he rebels, a man identifies himself with other men and so surpasses himself, and from this point of view human solidarity is metaphysical.
There’s no worse punishment than worthless, hopeless labor.
To will is to stir up paradoxes.
The futility of what was happening here seemed to take me by the throat, I felt like vomiting, and I had only one idea: to get it over, to go back to my cell, and sleep... and sleep.
There, too, in that Home where lives were flickering out, the dusk came as a mournful solace. With death so near, Mother must have felt like someone on the brink of freedom, ready to start life all over again.
It would take patience to wait for the Last Judgement. But that’s it, we’re in a hurry.
What we call basic truths are simply the ones we discovered after all the others.
Who, despite the pretensions of this society, can sleep in it in peace when they know that it derives its mediocre pleasures from the work of millions of dead souls?
The trouble is, there is nothing less spectacular than a pestilence and, if only because they last so long, great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memory of those who have lived through them, the dreadful days of the plague do not seem like vast flames, cruel and magnificent, but rather like an endless trampling that flattened everything in its path.
Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves.
Between “everywhere” and “forever” there is no compromise.
Tyrants know there is in the work of art an emancipatory force, which is mysterious only to those who do not revere it. Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.
A city deprived of everything, devoid of light and devoid of heat, starved, and still not crushed.
To be sure, I occasionally pretended to take life seriously. But very soon frivolity of seriousness struck me and I merely went on playing my role as well as I could. I played at being efficient, intelligent, virtuous, civic-minded, shocked, indulgent, fellow-spirited, edifying... I was absent at the moment when I took up the most space.
Then it was that the thought of death burst into my daily life. I would measure the years separating me from my end. I would look for examples of men of my age who were already dead. And I was tormented by the thought that I might not have time to accomplish my task. What task? I had no idea. Frankly, was what I was doing worth continuing?