The sun was clear and diaphanous like white win. Its light barely touched the moving figures, gave them no shadow, no relief: faces and hands made spots of pale gold.
And then, tired out by all the shouting, I always simply went to bed. Today I’m doing it to feel the pleasure you don’t yet know, of turning abruptly from friendship to love, from strength to tenderness. Tonight I love you in a way that you have not known in me: I am neither worn down by travels nor wrapped up in the desire for your presence. I am mastering my love for you and turning it inwards as a constituent element of myself.
This is the girl, here, this girl with a ruined look who touches me and whom I love.
Everything looks so much alike that you wonder how people got the idea of inventing names, to make distinctions.
I shall have to get used all over again to speaking to people without touching them.
Man is not only that which he conceives himself to be, but that which he wills himself to be...
I am illuminated within by a diminishing light.
Three o’clock. Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do. An odd moment in the afternoon.
This is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything that he does.
What men have in common is not a “nature” but a condition, that is, an ensemble of limits and restrictions: the inevitability of death, the necessity of working for a living, of living in a world already inhabited by other men.
I wanted to be missed, like water, like bread, like air, by all other people in all other places.
In choosing myself, I choose man.
Like all dreamers I confuse disenchantment with truth.
People are like dice, you throw yourself in the direction of your own choosing...
He raised himself on his hands and looked at Irene’s face: the nudity of that feminine body had risen into her face, the body had reabsorbed it, as nature reabsorbs forsaken gardens.
But I can’t see anything any more: however much I search the past I can only retrieve scraps of images and I am not sure what they represent, nor whether they are remembered or invented.
Existentialism is not atheist in the sense that it would exhaust itself in demonstrations of the non-existence of God. It declares, rather, that even if God existed that would make no difference from its point of view. Not that we believe God does exist, but we think that the real problem is not that of His existence; what man needs is to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God.
Everything happens to every man as though the whole human race had its eyes fixed upon what he is doing and regulated its conduct accordingly.
In irony a man annihilates what he posits within one and the same act; he leads us to believe in order not to be believed; he affirms to deny and denies to affirm; he creatives a positive object but it has no being other than its nothingness.
Suddenly they existed, then suddenly they existed no longer: existence is without memory; of the vanished it retains nothing – not even a memory. Existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere; existence – which is limited only by existence.