“Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. Anddiversity is the home of art. The only thought to liberate the mindis that which leaves it alone, certain of its limits and of itsimpending end. No doctrine tempts it. It awaits the ripening of thework and of life. Detached from it, the work will once more give abarely muffled voice to a soul Forever freed from hope. Or it willgive voice to nothing if the creator, tired of his activity, intends toturn away. That is equivalent.”

“To work and create 'for nothing', to sculpture in clay, to know that one's creation has no future, to see one's work destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this has no more importance than building for centuries- this is the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing these two tasks simultaneously, negating on one hand and magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator. He must give the void its colors.”

“A person's life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art or love or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.”

“In any case, if the reader would have a correct idea of the mood of these exiles, we must conjure up once more those dreary evenings, sifting down through a haze of dust and golden light upon the treeless streets filled with teeming crowds of men and women. For, characteristically, the sound that rose towards the terraces still bathed in the last glow of daylight, now that the noises of vehicles and motors--the sole voice of cities in ordinary times--had ceased, was but one vast rumour of low voices and incessant footfalls, the drumming of innumerable soles timed to the eerie whistling of the plague in the sultry air above, the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts.”

“What I know, what is certain, what I cannot deny,what I cannot reject—this is what counts. I can negate everythingof that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desirefor unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. Ican refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends orenraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and thisdivine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t knowwhether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I knowthat I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for mejust now to know it. What can a meaning outside my conditionmean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch,what resists me—that is what I understand. And these twocertainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and theimpossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonableprinciple—I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What othertruth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lackand which means nothing within the limits of my condition?”

“And the wave of tenderness and pity that at once filled his heart was not the stirring of the soul that leads the son to the memory of the vanished father, but the overwhelming compassion that a grown man feels for an unjustly murdered child – something here was not in the natural order and, in truth, there was no order but only madness and chaos when the son was older than the father. The course of time itself was shattering around him while he remained motionless among those tombs he now no longer saw, and the years no longer kept to their places in the great river that flows to its end. They were no more than waves and surf and eddies where Jacques Cormery was not struggling in the grip of anguish and pity. He looked at the other inscriptions in that section and realized from the dates that this soil was strewn with children who had been the fathers of graying men who thought they were living in this present time. For he too believed he was living, he alone had created himself, he knew his own strength, his vigor, he could cope and he had himself well in hand. But, in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling – that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at last in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever.”

“in the strange dizziness of that moment, the statue every man eventually erects and that hardens in the fire of the years, into which he then creeps and there awaits its final crumbling - that statue was rapidly cracking, it was already collapsing. All that was left was this anguished heart, eager to live, rebelling against the deadly order of the world that had been with him for forty years, and still struggling against the wall that separated him from the secret of all life, wanting to go farther, to go beyond, and to discover, discover before dying, discover at least in order to be, just once to be, for a single second, but forever.”