“the play of the toughest and most lucid mind are at the same time both lavished and squandered.”

“Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience”

“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

“The absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”

“The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.”

“I hadn't understood how days could be both long and short at the same time: long to live through, maybe, but so drawn out that they ended up flowing into one another. They lost their names. Only 'yesterday' and 'tomorrow' still had any meaning for me.”

“Physical jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time as being a self-judgment. One attributes to the rival the nasty thoughts one had oneself in the same circumstances.”