Human rebellion ends in metaphysical revolution. It progresses from appearances to acts, from the dandy to the revolutionary.
The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.
At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.
If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.
Fate is not in man but around him.
You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.
There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.
I realized then that a man who had lived only one day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.
For ever, I shall be a stranger to myself.
No doubt our love was still there, but quite simply it was unusable, heavy to carry, inert inside of us, sterile as crime or condemnation. It was no longer anything except a patience with no future and a stubborn wait.
In the past, the poverty they shared had a certain sweetness about it. When the end of the day came and they would eat their dinner in silence with the oil lamp between them, there was a secret joy in such simplicity, such retrenchment.
Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.
The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.
It was previously a question of finding out whether or not life had to have a meaning to be lived. It now becomes clear on the contrary that it will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.
Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
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.