In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips.
In the absurd world the value of a notion or of a life is measured by its sterility.
I have never truly been sincere and enthusiastic except when I used to play sports and, in the army, when I took part in the plays that we put on for our own enjoyment. In both cases, there was a set of rules, which was not serious, though you pretended to take it seriously. Even today, Sunday football matches in a crowded stadium, and the theatre, which I have loved with a unique passion, are the only places where I feel innocent.
A writer cannot serve today those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.
That’s my job in life – giving people chances.
There is no noble love but that which recognizes itself to be both short-lived and exceptional.
The ultimate end, awaited but never desired, the ultimate end is negligible.
Insurrection is certainly not the sum total of human experience.
In order to reveal to all eyes what he was made of, I wanted to break open the handsome wax-figure I presented everywhere.
But I was sure about me, about everything, surer than he could ever be, sure of my life and sure of the death I had waiting for me. Yes, that was all I had. But at least I had as much of a hold on it as it had on me.
To feel one’s attachment to a certain region, one’s love for a certain group of men, to know that there is always a spot where one’s heart will feel at peace – these are many certainties for a single human life. And yet this is not enough. But at certain moments everything yearns for that spiritual home. ‘Yes, we must go back there – there, indeed.
I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.
The reserves of emotion pent up during those many months when for everybody the flame of life burned low were being recklessly squandered to celebrate this, the red-letter day of their survival. Tomorrow real life would begin again, with its restrictions. But for the moment people in very different walks of life were rubbing shoulders, fraternizing. The leveling-out that death’s imminence had failed in practice to accomplish was realized at last, for a few gay hours, in the rapture of escape.
Why, because an author has more rights than ordinary people, as everybody knows. People will stand much more from him.
Every insubordinate person, when he rises up against oppression, reaffirms thereby the solidarity of all men.
People were starting on a voyage to a world which had ceased to concern me forever.
Every man alive was privileged; there was only one class of men, the privileged class. All alike would be condemned to die one day; his turn, too, would come like the others’.
When a slave rebels against his master, the situation presented is of one man pitted against another, under a cruel sky, far from the exalted realms of principles. The final result is merely the murder of a man. The servile rebellions, peasant risings, beggar outbreaks, rustic revolts, all advance the concept of a principle of equality, a life for a life, which despite every kind of mystification and audacity will always be found in the purest manifestations of the revolutionary spirit-.
Whenever any of them spoke through the mask, the muslin bulged and grew moist over the lips. This gave a sort of unreality to the conversation; it was like a colloquy of statues.
The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.
Ha habido en el mundo tantas pestes como guerras y sin embargo, pestes y guerras cogen a las gentes siempre desprevenidas.