Things that in other circumstances would have excited him left him unmoved now, for they were simply part of his life, until the moment he was back in his room using all his strength and care to smother the flame of life that burned within him.
When one has once had the good luck to love intensely, life is spent in trying to recapture that ardour and that illumination.
The cats sleep for days at a time and make love from the first star until dawn. Their pleasures are fierce, and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.
A crown of kisses to the queen of dreams.
Awareness, no matter how confused it may be, develops from every act of rebellion: the sudden, dazzling perception that there is something in man with which he can identify himself, even if only for a moment.
And for five years it was no longer possible to enjoy the call of birds in the cool of the evening. We were forced to despair. We were cut off from the world because to each moment clung a whole mass of mortal images. For five years the earth has not seen a single morning without death agonies, a single evening without prisons, a noon without slaughter.
All is well, everything is permitted, and nothing is hateful – these are absurd judgments.
In order to be created, a work of art must first of all make use of the dark forces of the soul. But not without channeling them, surrounding them with dikes, so that the water in them rises.
The hardest thing is to go on living and not to believe in one’s own lies.
Don’t think for a minute that your friends will telephone you every evening, as they ought to, in order to find out if this doesn’t happen to be the evening when you are deciding to commit suicide, or simply whether you don’t need company, whether you are not in the mood to go out. No, don’t worry, they’ll ring up the evening you are not alone, when life is beautiful.
Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit.
In medical science, as in daily life, it was unwise to jump to conclusions.
Thinking is learning all over again to see, to be attentive, to focus consciousness; it is turning every idea and every image, in the manner of Proust, into a privileged moment.
They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it’s quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons.
You know that even very intelligent people glory in being able to empty one bottle more than the next man.
But memory is less disposed to compromise.
We must mend what has been torn apart, make justice imaginable again in a world so obviously unjust, give happiness a meaning once more to peoples poisoned by the misery of the century.
The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion.
When I was first imprisoned, the hardest thing was that my thoughts were still those of a free man.
Every man needs slaves as he needs fresh air. Commanding is breathing – you agree with me? And even the most destitute manage to breathe. The lowest man in the social scale still has his wife or his child. If he’s unmarried, a dog. The essential thing, after all, is being able to get angry with someone who has no right to talk back.