“We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.”

“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

“We love people not because for good they did for us, but for good we did for them.”

“Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses...”

“Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.”

“We live in a world where one needs to choose - to be the victim or the executioner, and nothing else.”

“My dear friend, we mustn't give them even the slightest excuse to judge us! Otherwise, we end up in pieces.”