Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life.
I’m not tragic these days, I don’t weep, but I feel alone, bewildered, far from you, far from everything – nothing has any meaning.
It takes a lot of strength, a lot of pride or a lot of love to believe that what one man does has any importance, or that life can conquer death.
Ze had een hekel aan die anonieme hotelkamers waar zoveel mensen waren geweest zonder sporen achter te laten, waar zij zelf ook geen enkel spoor zou achterlaten. Alles blijft precies hetzelfde als ik er niet meer ben. Dat is wat doodgaan is, dacht ze.
Women’s entire history has been written by men.
Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity. It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
We have seen that it is possible to escape the temptations of sadism and masochism when both partners recognize each other as equals; as soon as there is a little modesty and some generosity between men and women, ideas of victory and defeat are abolished: the act of love becomes a free exchange.
Making money does not seem to me a very elevating ambition.
It may happen that in a matrilineal system she has a very high position: but – beware – the presence of a woman chief or a queen at the head of a tribe absolutely does not mean that women are sovereign: the reign of Catherine the Great changed nothing in the fate of Russian peasant women; and they lived no less frequently in a state of abjection.
They’re devouring my life with their mouths, with their eyes.
Likewise, the most mediocre of males believes himself a demigod next to women.
I didn’t understand: you don’t believe what you believe on purpose. Could you be punished because certain ideas come into your mind?
People say you have to have faith because believing is irrational. So I end up thinking that the more irrational things seem, the more likely they are to be true.
Morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.
To be no one, all things considered, is something of a privilege.
The secret of happiness and the very height of artistic achievement is to be like everybody else, yet to be like no one on earth.
I cannot withdraw into myself. I exist, outside myself and everywhere in the world. There is not an inch of my path which does not encroach on the path of another: there is no way of being that can prevent me from overflowing myself at every moment. This life that I weave with my own substance, it offers other men a thousand unknown faces, it crosses impetuously their fate.
The heartbreaking side of growing old is not in the things around one but in oneself.
There are photographs of both of us, taken at about the same time: I am eighteen, she is nearly forty. Today I could almost be her mother and the grandmother of that sad-eyed girl. I am so sorry for them – for me because I am so young and I understand nothing; for her because her future is closed and she has never understood anything.
I had had a general sort of idea that the life I had behind me was a landscape in which I could wander as I pleased, gradually exploring its winding and its hidden valleys. No. I could repeat names and dates, just as a schoolboy can bring out a carefully learned lesson on a subject he knows nothing about. And at long intervals there arose worn, faded images, as abstract as those in my old French history: they stood out arbitrarily, against a white background.
When one has lived so much for others it is quite hard to turn oneself back again – to live for oneself.