Every artist thus keeps within himself a single source which nourishes during his lifetime what he is and what he.
The first time that this tribulation appeared in history, it was to strike down the enemies of God. Pharaoh opposed the designs of the Eternal and the plague brought him to his knees. Since the beginning of history, the scourge of God has brought down the proud and the blind beneath His feet. Think on this and fall to your knees.
Oh, I know it’s an absurd situation, but we’re all involved in it, and we’ve got to accept it as it is.
One of the most striking consequences of the closing of the gates was, in fact, this sudden deprivation befalling people who were completely unprepared for it.
Crime, too, means solitude, even if a thousand people join together to commit it.
Yesterday it was love. Today the great passions of unity and liberty disrupt the world. yesterday love led to individual death. Today collective passions make us run the risk of universal destruction. Today, just as yesterday, art wants to save from death a living image of our passions and our sufferings.
Nonetheless, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.
All he had gained was to have known the plague and to remember it, to have known friendship and to remember it, to have known affection and to have one day to remember it. All that a man could win in the game of plague and life was knowledge and memory.
The townspeople had adapted, they had come to heel, as people say, because that was all they could do. Naturally, they still had an attitude of misfortune and suffering, but they did not feel its sting.
The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity. Understanding the world for a man is reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal.
It comes to this: like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment.
The blasphemy is reverent, since every blasphemy is, ultimately, a participation in holiness.
For the existentials negation is their God.
One finds many injustices in the world, but there is one that is never mentioned, climate.
There is thus a will to live without rejecting anything of life, which is the virtue I honor most in this world.
It is probably true that a man remains forever unknown to us and that there is in him something irreducible that escapes us.
There were no longer any individual destinies, but a collective history that was the plague, and feelings shared by all.
I realized that I’d managed to get through another Sunday, that mother was now buried, that I was going to go back to work and that, after all, nothing had changed.
There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart. The most destitute men often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent.
One fancies one is quite sure about something, when in point of fact one isn’t.