I’m not obstinate, I’m highly strung: I don’t know how to let myself go. I must always think of what is happening to me – it’s a form of self-protection.
And you know what wickedness is, and shame, and fear. There were days when you peered into yourself, into the secret places of your heart, and what you saw there made you faint with horror.
I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.
From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek.
Everything happens to every man as if the entire human race were staring at him and measuring itself by what he does. So every man ought to be asking himself, “Am I really a man who is entitled to act in such a way that the entire human race should be measuring itself by my actions?” And if he does not ask himself that, he masks his anguish.
Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.
Thing are bad! Things are very bad: I have it, the filth, the Nausea.
Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes.
How far away from them I feel, up on this hill. It seems to me that I belong to another species.
There is something I longed for more than all the rest – without realizing it properly. It wasn’t love, heaven forbid, nor glory, nor wealth. It was... anyway, I had imagined that at certain moments my life could take on a rare and precious quality.
L’homme est une passion inutile.
Love was not something to be felt, not a particular emotion, nor yet a particular shade of feeling, it was much more like a lowering curse on the horizon, a precursor of disaster.
The truth is that I can’t put down my pen: I think I’m going to have the Nausea and I feel as though I’m delaying it while writing. So I write whatever comes into my mind.
Giacometti knows that space is a cancer on being, and eats everything; to sculpt, for him, is to take the fat off space, he compresses space, so as to drain off its exteriority.
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...