Yes, one can wager war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbor while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
We can act only in our time, among the people who surround us. We shall be capable of nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. Since all contemporary action leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether, and why, we have the right to kill.
When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid, it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way...
You’re never altogether unhappy.
Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
And as far as he was concerned, he needed to be listened to in order to believe in his life.
The world always says the same thing. And in that patient truth which proceeds from star to star is established a freedom that releases us from ourselves and from others, as in that other patient truth which proceeds from death to death.
Death will be my supreme protest against a world of tears and blood.
Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.
What he had loved in Marthe were those evenings when they would walk into the movie theater and men’s eyes turned toward her, that moment when he offered her to the world. What he loved in her was his power and his ambition to live. Even his desire, the deepest craving of his flesh, probably derived from this initial astonishment at possessing a lovely body, at mastering and humiliating it.
I got up right away because I was hungry, but Marie told me I hadn’t kissed her since that morning. It was true, and yet I had wanted to. “Come into the water,” she said. We ran and threw ourselves into the first little waves. We swam a few strokes and she reached out and held on to me. I felt her legs wrapped around mine and I wanted her.
There is more in Man to admire than there is to despise.
The town was peopled with sleepwalkers, whose trance was broken only on the rare occasions when at night their wounds, to all appearance closed, suddenly reopened. Then, waking with a start, they would run their fingers over the wounds with a sort of absentminded curiosity, twisting their lips, and in a flash their grief blazed up again, and abruptly there rose before them the mournful visage of their love. In the morning they harked back to normal conditions, in other words, the plague.
I know that heaven, which was indifferent to your horrible victories, will be equally indifferent to your just defeat.
Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blared. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me.
Maybe, after all, it doesn’t want it enough? Maybe we don’t love life enough? Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives.
Life is not easy, but there would be religion, art, love that we sustain ourselves with.
Rien, rien n’avait d’importance et je savais bien pourquoi.
The young don’t know that experience is a defeat and that we must lose everything in order to win a little knowledge.