Everything that burns, everything that rips me apart, I want to suffer with my body. I’d rather have a hundred wounds, whips, poisons – than this kind of suffering in the head, this phantom of suffering, which touches me softly and caresses me without ever really hurting.
He yawned; he had finished the day, and he had also finished with his youth. Various tried and proved rules of conduct had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, flat seriousness, stoicism – all the aids whereby a man may savor, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life... ‘I have attained the age of reason.
If I didn’t try to assume responsibility for my own existence, it would seem utterly absurd to go on existing.
Then time started flowing again and the emptiness grew larger.
Nothingness carries being in its heart.
Temporality is obviously an organised structure, and these three so-called elements of time: past, present, future, must not be envisaged as a collection of ‘data’ to be added together... but as the structured moments of an original synthesis. Otherwise we shall immediately meet with this paradox: the past is no longer, the future is not yet, as for the instantaneous present, everyone knows that it is not at all: it is the limit of infinite division, like the dimensionless point.
I had spent my time counterfeiting eternity, I had understood nothing.
Reflection poisons desire.
From the very fact, indeed, that I am conscious of the motives which solicit my action, these motives are already transcendent objects from my consciousness, they are outside; in vain shall I seek to cling to them: I escape from them through my very existence. I am condemned to exist forever beyond my essence, beyond the affective and rational motives of my act: I am condemned to be free.
That’s what I must avoid: I mustn’t put strangeness where there’s nothing. I think that is the danger of keeping a diary: you exaggerate everything, you are on the look-out, and you continually stretch the truth.
To exist is simply to he there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them.
Time gnaws and wears away; it separates; it flies. And by virtue of separation – by separating man from his pain or from the object of his pain – time cures.
Don’t be afraid; I’ll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and you’ll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam.
Perhaps there is nothing in the world I cling to as much as this feeling of adventure; but it comes when it pleases; it is gone so quickly and how empty I am once it has left. Does it, ironically, pay me these short visits in order to show me that I have wasted my life?
Man is fully responsible for his nature, choices and lifestyle.
Man is a useless passion. It is meaningless that we live and it is meaningless that we die.
When a man gets drunk he gets sentimental. That’s what I wanted to avoid.
No, my child, these things are impossible. It would have been better if she had recognize the truth courageously. She would have suffered once, then time would have erased with its sponge. There is nothing like looking things in the face, believe me.
All I really want to do is go to the book store, drink coffee and read.
Lucien thought with bitter pleasure that his parents found him looking fine. “I don’t exist.” He closed his eyes and let himself drift: existence is an illusion because I know I don t exist, all I have to do is plug my ears and not think about anything and I’ll become nothingness.