“Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.”

“Heaven and earth. Our reason has driven all away. Alone at last, we end up by ruling over a desert. What imagination could we have left for that higher equilibrium in which nature balanced history, beauty, virtue, and which applied the music of numbers even to blood-tragedy? We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of theoffice clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.”

“At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead.”

“This absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope. And I have not yet spoken of the most absurd character, who is the creator.”

“I was wrong, after all, to tell you that the essential was to avoid judgement. The essential is being able to permit oneself everything, even if, from time to time, one has to profess vociferously one's own infamy.”

“There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.”

“When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling.Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.”