“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.”

“Spring declares itself solely in the quality of the air or the little baskets of flowers that street-sellers bring in from the suburbs; this is a spring that is sold in the market-place.”

“In the middle of the night, through the whole of the rest of the summer and beneath the autumn, one could see strange convoys of trams without passengers proceeding down the front, rattling along above the sea. Eventually, the people discovered what was going on; and despite patrols preventing anyone from reaching the promenade, some groups did quite often manage to get among the rocks right above the sea and throw flowers into the carriages as soon as the trams went past. One could hear the vehicles still bumping along on a summer's night, laden with flowers and corpses.”

“Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.”

“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.”

“Every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect.”

“Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”