I am sure that fifteen minutes would be enough to reach supreme self-contempt. No thank you, I want none of that.
Paris was dead. More cars, more pedestrians – except at certain hours in certain quarters. We walked between the cobblestones; it appeared that we were the forgotten members of an immense exodus. A bit of provincial life was caught on the sharp angles of the capital; it remained a skeleton city, pompous and immobile, too long and too big for us: too large, the streets that we discovered as far as the eye could see, too great the distances, too vast the perspectives: we got lost.
Anyhow, it is a definite colour: I am glad I have red hair. There is it is in the mirror, it makes itself seen, it shines. I am still lucky if my forehead was surmounted by one of those neutral heads of hair which are neither chestnut not blond, my face would be lost in vagueness, it would make me dizzy.
Men all alone, completely alone with horrible monstrosities, will run through the streets, pass heavily in front of me, their eyes staring, fleeing their ills yet carrying with them, open-mouthed, with their insect-tongue flapping its wings. Then I’ll burst out laughing even though my body may be covered with filthy, infected scabs which blossom into flowers of flesh, violets, buttercups.
To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out – but you can’t prevent your being there.
The flesh is the pure contingency of presence.
Though impervious to the sacred, I loved magic. The cinema was a suspect appearance that I loved perversely for what it still lacked. That streaming was everything, it was nothing, it was everything reduced to nothing.
I’ve dropped out of their hearts like a little sparrow fallen from its nest.
Revolutionary man must be a contingent being, unjustifiable but free, entirely immersed in the society that oppresses him, but capable of transcending this society by his effort to change it. Idealism mystifies him in that it binds him by rights and values that are already given; it conceals from him his power to devise roads of his own. But materialism also mystifies him, by depriving him of his freedom. The revolutionary philosophy must be a philosophy of transcendence.
But the end is there, transforming everything. For us, the man is already the hero of the story. His moroseness, his money troubles are much more precious than ours, they are all gilded by the light of future passions.
I liked this shop very much, it has a cynical and obstinate look, it insolently recalled the rights of dirt and vermin, only two paces from the most costly church in France.
I took everything as seriously as if I were immortal.
Es kommt nicht darauf an, was man aus uns gemacht hat, sondern darauf, was wir aus dem machen, was man aus uns gemacht hat.
If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.
Neither sad nor gay is the desert – a boundless waste of sand under a burning waste of sky.
Those who conceal from themselves this total freedom, under the guise of solemnity, or by making deterministic excuses, I will call cowards. Others, who try to prove their existence is necessary, when man’s appearance on earth is merely contingent, I will call bastards.
Existence is a fullness which man can never abandon.
The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust.
At the same time, I learned that you always lose. Only the rascals think they win.
Only he who knows how to speak can be silent.